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keeping agreements

New Year Resolution

January first may be a somewhat arbitrary date to divide the chapters of our lives, but there’s something to be said for joining the momentum of the mass consciousness focused… Read More

Six Ways to Build a Healthy Life Structure That Will Direct You Towards Your Dreams

Last week we looked at ways to sweeten your life, a concept from my and Briana’s book, The Well Life, which also forms much of the foundation material for the… Read More

How to Rebuild Self-Trust

We recently opened enrollment for this year’s life coach training program, which always feels exciting to me. There’s a buzz of activity as the new participants get oriented and we’re… Read More

Sustaining Your Resolutions: Inertia, Integrity, and the Power of the Earth Element

Are you someone who sets ambitious goals at the beginning of the year but then struggles to follow through on them? We’ve been there. It’s one of the reasons we… Read More

Stay in the present moment. These gaps don’t happen in the past or the future, they always happen now, so we must be dwelling in the present in order to experience them. Be a willing participant in whatever is happening right now. Stay here with your whole being, as often as you can muster.
Expect magic. You’re less likely to notice something you aren’t expecting (and even less likely to notice something you don’t believe it). If you expect magic, you’ll discover magic. What qualifies as magic? Virtually everything, if you’re fully open and present to it, holds awe-inspiring magic. Science and spirit both. When you expect magic, it’s not like magical things start popping up everywhere. The magical things already are everywhere; the difference is your clouded lens clears up and you see it.
When you experience a “gap” or some magic, trust it. Don’t grasp at it. Don’t rush to write or talk about it. Don’t reach for your phone. If you feel yourself yearning to latch onto something habitual, just notice that squirming feeling inside you that wants the comfort of routine (even though it pales in comparison to this). Breathe and stay with it. Say “yes” to it with your whole being.
Approach life with humility and innocence. Don’t assume anything. Drop your preconceptions and labels. See, hear, and feel the aspects of life that you’re not usually drawn to. Notice the spaces between the objects you usually focus on. What’s happening in the background? And how about the background behind the background?
Take our course, Sacred Expansion. It starts on May 3rd and the purpose is to guide participants to discover what’s keeping you blocked or confined and help you expand into who you really are. Laura, a past participant, had this to say about her experience in the course: Sacred expansion truly changed my life. I was finally able to see me and begin the process of releasing the layers of ego identities and belief systems that were limiting my growth. People say I am like a different person now versus then. However, I liken it to my being myself without the encumbrances I was carrying that were not me. Click here for more information.

When we started the Dragontree, our mission was (and still is) to help people find peace. Back then it was mainly through massage, acupuncture, and healthy living. Over the years we’ve increasingly focused on guiding people to peace by helping them expand beyond their “small self.” I hope these suggestions help you do that. Be well, Peter [post_title] => Freedom and Peace Regardless of Your Circumstances [post_excerpt] => [post_status] => publish [comment_status] => open [ping_status] => open [post_password] => [post_name] => freedom-and-peace-regardless-of-your-circumstances [to_ping] => [pinged] => [post_modified] => 2022-04-21 21:26:58 [post_modified_gmt] => 2022-04-21 21:26:58 [post_content_filtered] => [post_parent] => 0 [guid] => https://thedragontree.com/?p=8647 [menu_order] => 0 [post_type] => post [post_mime_type] => [comment_count] => 0 [filter] => raw [webinar_id] => 0 ) [1] => WP_Post Object ( [ID] => 8933 [post_author] => 3 [post_date] => 2023-01-19 19:24:36 [post_date_gmt] => 2023-01-19 19:24:36 [post_content] => When I first delved into cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT) as a psychology major, I remember thinking, “This is an evolution for humans.” CBT focuses on examining and challenging one’s thoughts and beliefs, changing related behaviors, and building coping skills and emotional regulation. Of course, there is a long philosophical tradition of examining the nature of human thought and behavior, but the advent of cognitive and behavioral psychology in the past couple centuries infused these concepts into mainstream culture in a profound way. It’s now common for people to talk about their thoughts as something separate from themselves, and to routinely employ behavior modification techniques in all areas of life. I had a mentor in my early 20s who was a big advocate of CBT, and at the time I told her I had been exploring methods for healing the memories of traumatic events. I felt both rebuffed and inspired when she said, “You’re wasting your time. We don’t need to go back and relive our childhood or spend the rest of our life lying on some shrink’s couch analyzing everything that ever happened to us! All that matters is, right now, are you going to be at the mercy of your thoughts and automatic behaviors, or are you going to manage whatever comes up in a conscious, intentional way?” I’ve thought a lot about this in the decades since. My mentor was of the mind that we don’t need to figure out why these painful or dysfunctional patterns keep coming up, we just need to change our response to them, and eventually we’ll transform our psychological makeup in a permanent way. I believe there is real value to this approach, and also . . . sometimes I think we need to go back. When it comes to our healing and growth, here are three good reasons to revisit your past: (1) If you’re constantly managing your response to a recurrent pattern, it might be more efficient to get to the root of the pattern and dismantle it (or at least mitigate it) so that it doesn’t come up much, if at all. Of course, you can also use cognitive and behavioral strategies if it does arise. (2) There is potential for deeper self-awareness, insight, and growth through visiting your past and coming to understand the factors that went into making you who you are. These are opportunities to forgive, correct misunderstandings, reframe our stories, and revise or erase beliefs. While it’s totally possible for many people to be happy without going there, it’s probably not possible to be self-actualized without making peace with your past. There are some caveats. Analyzing your past can be taken to a self-indulgent degree. It can retrigger old trauma. And most common, it can make us feel worse as we work through it (and experience it without resistance, perhaps for the first time) – though this usually gives way to greater freedom. Thus, it’s important to do this work when you’re feeling relatively stable, with a clear sense of why (what you hope to accomplish), and with the tools and/or support to do it in a way that’s likely to turn out well. (3) Finally, some people seek total liberation from our programming, i.e., the ego. Once this urge awakens in us, it often never goes fully back to sleep. If you’re in this boat, you may find value in recapitulation. I read about recapitulation in a Carlos Castaneda book when I was 18 and it seemed unfathomable. Castaneda, a Peruvian anthropologist-turned-apprentice of shamanism, was instructed by his teacher to write down his entire life story, from his very earliest memories, including every person he had ever met. This process, he was told, was necessary to free him from his worldly attachments. It took him years. I remember thinking, “I could never do that.” Since then, I’ve encountered various forms of recapitulation in my other studies of shamanism, and I now feel it’s more doable than I previously believed. Could it take years? Absolutely. But you’ve got time, and it’s not an all-or-nothing proposition. Every time we release some piece of baggage, it’s like dropping a sandbag from a hot air balloon. We’re that much lighter and freer – even if we’re not “done.” As we go through our history, we find countless moments that have a certain weight or charge. They exist in a state of incomplete resolution. Taken together they have a powerful influence on how we show up in the present. They can make us dwell in the past and fear the future. They can cause us to live within a fraction of the spectrum of what’s possible. In short, they limit our freedom. As we loosen our history’s grip on us, we thus loosen the grip of our ego, and we more readily access our true essence and potential. I stumbled upon my own recapitulation process while doing somatic releasing practices. In a nutshell, all our history with a charge – everything that doesn’t sit neutrally in us – can be experienced through the body. There is a physical expression and felt experience to all of it. And in willingly visiting it, experiencing it without resistance, and accepting it, we promote its resolution. If this is unfamiliar territory for you, just try this: Bring up something about your current life or your past that you wish were different. While holding this in mind, expand your awareness to include what you feel in your body. You will perceive a certain unease. As you meet it and even invite it, the unease loosens. (Sometimes this takes a little practice, especially if you’re not accustomed to feeling your feelings. If you’re interested in diving deeper into this process, check out our workbook called Freedom.) When we do this work we inevitably find layers of holding. We release one layer and discover another layer, and so on. In my case, I began to recognize the layers faster than I could process them, so I started writing them down. Hundreds of cords, linking me to my past, pulling on me, distorting my present self. The list grew at the same rate that I crossed things off it. I’m not nearly done, but I feel much lighter. I’m not saying a person can’t show up in a clean and authentic way until they release every conflict or resentment they’ve ever had. What I mean is that a thorough recapitulation facilitates ego liberation – something that’s beyond the scope of CBT and, frankly, not of interest to most people. In my own process, I found that I was sometimes inspired to move my body in certain ways to assist the release of a sticky pattern, which is an integral part of some somatic therapies. Interestingly, it’s also a technique used in shamanic recapitulation. As Sandra Ingerman and Hank Wesselman explain in their book, Awakening to the Spirit World, we can facilitate the “unraveling” of a memory (or the emotional charge attached to it) by spinning. This can also be accomplished by turning the head or twisting the body from side to side, and the authors say they believe this is also why EMDR (Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing) works. They recommend spinning or turning while breathing deep into the memory and its associated emotions, accepting it, and intending to release it. I believe recapitulation also occurs to some extent automatically, especially when we’re ready for it: in dreaming; in meditation, when we are sometimes spontaneously presented with something from the past that needs to be “cleared”; in yoga and exercise; and very often under the influence of entheogenic (psychedelic) substances, especially when used intentionally as medicine. This is why psilocybin mushrooms are rapidly gaining a reputation as one of the most effective therapies for attaining peace at the end of life. I’m curious to hear from readers about your experience with the different approaches I discussed. Have you used CBT, and did it help? Have you dug into your past to heal yourself? What methods did you use, and how did it go? Have you done a large scale recapitulation? What was the outcome? Please share. Be well, Peter [post_title] => Are You Willing to Go All the Way Back? [post_excerpt] => [post_status] => publish [comment_status] => open [ping_status] => open [post_password] => [post_name] => are-you-willing-to-go-all-the-way-back [to_ping] => [pinged] => [post_modified] => 2023-01-19 19:47:15 [post_modified_gmt] => 2023-01-19 19:47:15 [post_content_filtered] => [post_parent] => 0 [guid] => https://thedragontree.com/?p=8933 [menu_order] => 0 [post_type] => post [post_mime_type] => [comment_count] => 5 [filter] => raw [webinar_id] => 0 ) [2] => WP_Post Object ( [ID] => 8656 [post_author] => 3 [post_date] => 2022-05-05 20:14:03 [post_date_gmt] => 2022-05-05 20:14:03 [post_content] => There’s a well-known spiritual quote from philosopher and teacher Jiddhu Krishnamurti. The story goes that he was speaking to a group of students (who saw him as an enlightened master), and he whispered, “Do you want to know my secret?” At this, the room fell silent and everyone leaned forward. Then he continued, “I don’t mind what happens.” What I like about this idea is that it’s simple; it speaks of a state of transcendence of the ego and unshakable peace. But as an expression of absolute spiritual truth, it also lends itself to spiritual bypassing and illusions about spirituality. The tricky thing about Krishnamurti’s statement is that he was presumably speaking not from his ego but from an expanded state of consciousness, his higher Self. Thus, while not minding what happens was his outlook from this state, it’s not necessarily the path that got him there. In Krishnamurti’s case, he went through a series of spontaneous, often painful experiences over many years that caused an opening of his consciousness. That’s not something we can replicate at will. So what can we garner from this “secret”? It’s a good opening to a discussion on how we relate to absolute spiritual truths while existing in a world of relativity. Even among non-dual spiritual traditions (meaning, all the world is considered to be an expression of one great Being, and separation is an illusion), there is often a distinction made between the Source in an absolute sense (which is formless) and the many forms it takes in the relative world. In the realm of the relative, which is where the majority of human minds dwell, relativity directs nearly every aspect of our lives. For instance, when we say something is good, we’re usually not coming from the experience that the universe is fundamentally Good, and therefore all of its expressions are imbued with that same essence of goodness. What we mean is that things are good relative to some other way they could be. Thus, we’re directed toward things that we perceive as better than our other options and away from things that seem worse. And absolute spiritual truths – like “the universe is fundamentally good” – are simply lofty concepts to most people. We do get glimpses of them though (as I’ve written about in my articles on “gaps” in the dominant egocentric state), and these often fuel a drive for spiritual awakening. People who have gone through a certain form of spiritual awakening (what’s sometimes referred to as enlightenment, liberation, or moksha) often describe it as an experience of becoming perpetually conscious of the absolute. This doesn’t make the relative disappear, but the awareness of the undying oneness that unifies all apparent differences enables them to play in relativity without the “high stakes” feeling – and the anxiousness and drama that go with it – that most humans experience. This is why it’s referred to as liberation, which can be a very appealing notion to anyone who wants to be happy. So, apparently from this state, Krishnamurti said, “I don’t mind what happens” because, in an absolute sense, nothing is ever wrong. Nor is there such a thing as tragedy or victory. To win a race just means one part of the Source crossed the finish line before another part of the same Source (or God beat God, if you prefer that name). Likewise, the death of any given expression of the Source is akin to a red blood cell dying and being recycled into a new blood cell; the Whole has lost nothing in the process. It's important to recognize that an absolute spiritual truth is different from an uplifting life principle or a good piece of advice. If someone told you their “secret” is “Focus on the good” or “Don’t sweat the small stuff” or “Practice gratitude” or “Don’t take anything personally” you could immediately adopt it and start living it. But to a person who hasn’t realized and directly experienced it, an absolute truth isn’t actionable in the same way. And in relative terms, the absolute may make no sense at all. Imagine that a dog is biting your leg and you think to yourself, “I’m going to be spiritual about this. What did Krishnamurti say? Oh yeah, I don’t mind what happens. I guess I’d better breathe through this. Whew, that’s a lot of blood. Do I just let him keep gnawing? I don’t mind. I don’t mind. I don’t mind. If I call 9-1-1, does that constitute “minding”?” I doubt many people would take an unrealized spiritual truth to this extent, but as you can imagine, it’s possible to get into some trouble this way. Next week we’ll try to find the usefulness in statements of absolute truth and we’ll talk about what to do if you do mind what happens. Meanwhile, I always love to hear what readers think of these philosophical explorations. Be well, Peter [post_title] => Can We be Misguided by Spiritual Truths? [post_excerpt] => [post_status] => publish [comment_status] => open [ping_status] => open [post_password] => [post_name] => can-we-be-misguided-by-spiritual-truths [to_ping] => [pinged] => [post_modified] => 2022-05-05 20:14:03 [post_modified_gmt] => 2022-05-05 20:14:03 [post_content_filtered] => [post_parent] => 0 [guid] => https://thedragontree.com/?p=8656 [menu_order] => 0 [post_type] => post [post_mime_type] => [comment_count] => 0 [filter] => raw [webinar_id] => 0 ) ) [post_count] => 3 [current_post] => -1 [before_loop] => 1 [in_the_loop] => [post] => WP_Post Object ( [ID] => 8647 [post_author] => 3 [post_date] => 2022-04-21 20:57:54 [post_date_gmt] => 2022-04-21 20:57:54 [post_content] => A few weeks ago I wrote about the “gaps” in everyday reality when the spiritual dimension peeks through. Sometimes they’re so profound they change us forever. Like opening the curtains to a view of life that’s truer and freer than the story we’ve been perpetuating. More often they’re like little moments of remembering or brief glimmers of magic. Each one might not be earth-shaking, but when invited to come more often and to stay for longer, they begin to open us in a lasting way. By this I mean we expand into a sense of self that’s bigger than this personality and its circumstances. Why would someone want this? Some people want it because they’re driven to know the truth. Others want it because it tends to translate to qualities of freedom and peace that are unattainable through “ordinary” means. Usually we think of peace as a condition that results from all circumstances being in relative harmony, and we think of freedom as a condition of certain liberties ensured by our government. But this peace and freedom are present regardless of our circumstances. There are many ways to facilitate this process. Here are a few:

Stay in the present moment. These gaps don’t happen in the past or the future, they always happen now, so we must be dwelling in the present in order to experience them. Be a willing participant in whatever is happening right now. Stay here with your whole being, as often as you can muster.
Expect magic. You’re less likely to notice something you aren’t expecting (and even less likely to notice something you don’t believe it). If you expect magic, you’ll discover magic. What qualifies as magic? Virtually everything, if you’re fully open and present to it, holds awe-inspiring magic. Science and spirit both. When you expect magic, it’s not like magical things start popping up everywhere. The magical things already are everywhere; the difference is your clouded lens clears up and you see it.
When you experience a “gap” or some magic, trust it. Don’t grasp at it. Don’t rush to write or talk about it. Don’t reach for your phone. If you feel yourself yearning to latch onto something habitual, just notice that squirming feeling inside you that wants the comfort of routine (even though it pales in comparison to this). Breathe and stay with it. Say “yes” to it with your whole being.
Approach life with humility and innocence. Don’t assume anything. Drop your preconceptions and labels. See, hear, and feel the aspects of life that you’re not usually drawn to. Notice the spaces between the objects you usually focus on. What’s happening in the background? And how about the background behind the background?
Take our course, Sacred Expansion. It starts on May 3rd and the purpose is to guide participants to discover what’s keeping you blocked or confined and help you expand into who you really are. Laura, a past participant, had this to say about her experience in the course: Sacred expansion truly changed my life. I was finally able to see me and begin the process of releasing the layers of ego identities and belief systems that were limiting my growth. People say I am like a different person now versus then. However, I liken it to my being myself without the encumbrances I was carrying that were not me. Click here for more information.

You may also be interested in:

Freedom and Peace Regardless of Your Circumstances

Are You Willing to Go All the Way Back?

Can We be Misguided by Spiritual Truths?

The Dragontree

keeping agreements

New Year Resolution

Six Ways to Build a Healthy Life Structure That Will Direct You Towards Your Dreams

How to Rebuild Self-Trust

Sustaining Your Resolutions: Inertia, Integrity, and the Power of the Earth Element

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