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Growing, Observing, and Opening: Three More Paths to a Long Life

We’re incredible organisms. With proper care, our bodies and minds can last for a century or more. Just what constitutes “proper care” is up for debate, but over the past… Read More

Since issues around money and abundance are so prevalent, I thought I’d share a square on the dualities of attraction and aversion intersected with scarcity versus abundance. It’s easy for most people to feel into the attraction to abundance (upper right quadrant) and the aversion to scarcity (lower left quadrant). What about the aversion to abundance and the attraction to scarcity? It may seem incomprehensible that you’d be drawn toward scarcity (upper left), but it’s within all of us. Maybe when you’re poor it makes you feel you’re more “real,” more relatable, more connected to the common person, or more right about the belief that life is unfair. It may also seem incomprehensible that you’d be averse to abundance (lower right), but perhaps you have fears about a truly abundant life: maybe it will be harder, maybe it will be unfamiliar, maybe you’ll have no excuse not to be happy. Maybe you think abundance would change you in negative way. Maybe you think people would expect you to support them. If you feel challenged by abundance and scarcity, I encourage you to spend time visiting with each of these four states. Write freely about each one, acknowledging that all four are within you. See what arises in your body as you steep in each zone. If you have our book, Freedom, you can use that body-centered releasing process to neutralize the feelings that come up. As you make peace with the whole complex, you’ll feel less “baggage” around the idea of having an abundant life. Be well, Peter [post_title] => Clear Your Blocks to Abundance [post_excerpt] => [post_status] => publish [comment_status] => open [ping_status] => open [post_password] => [post_name] => clear-your-blocks-to-abundance [to_ping] => [pinged] => [post_modified] => 2022-02-25 21:30:38 [post_modified_gmt] => 2022-02-25 21:30:38 [post_content_filtered] => [post_parent] => 0 [guid] => https://thedragontree.com/?p=8579 [menu_order] => 0 [post_type] => post [post_mime_type] => [comment_count] => 4 [filter] => raw [webinar_id] => 0 ) [1] => WP_Post Object ( [ID] => 8114 [post_author] => 1 [post_date] => 2020-11-13 22:04:40 [post_date_gmt] => 2020-11-13 22:04:40 [post_content] => For the past several weeks, I’ve been writing about the factors that contribute to longevity. Some of these are (mostly) beyond our control – like having good genetics, being female, growing up in a developed country, and having access to good medical care. These articles are about the factors that we can control. Let’s continue. #7: Prioritize Community and Service When Briana and I decided to leave Portland, Oregon (where I had lived for 15 years and she’d been for 12), Briana was concerned about not having community at our new home in Colorado. In my excitement about the move I was nonchalant about it. “We’ll make new friends! Don’t worry! We’ve got each other!” I said with total confidence. But a couple years into our Colorado life we were wondering if we should move. We had a few friends, but didn’t feel we were part of a strong community – a group of people who share similar values, who look out for each other, who support each other’s growth, whose connectedness enhances the lives of everyone involved. As a lifelong introvert, I was surprised to discover how much community actually mattered to me – and how much I missed it. Luckily, through a combination of meeting more good people and our own efforts to feed it, our community started to grow, and we now feel rooted in Colorado and nourished by our people. I think my life expectancy has grown by at least 3 years. 😉 Having community consistently registers in studies as the single best (non-genetic, non-geographic) predictor of longevity. I believe this is even more likely when your orientation toward community is one of service. Putting oneself in service to the world lets us share our gifts – and hone those gifts – and see our value manifest in our good deeds. Both the recognition of our connections to others and the desire to make a positive difference seem to tether us to life. #8: Exchange Love and Touch Few medical interventions do us as much good as simply being touched compassionately and knowing we’re loved. It’s a damn shame that unhealed trauma, human neuroses, fear of rejection, and inherited pain have so distorted such a fundamentally GOOD thing. All of us were held snugly and perpetually in the womb. Most of us were held almost incessantly as newborns, quite a lot as infants, and frequently as toddlers. Then less and less as the years went on. A similar progression occurs for many of us around the openness of expressions of love in our lives. Often around adolescence things get weird – sometimes toxic even – and it’s common to never find our way back to that earlier freedom around the exchange of touch and expression of love. Whatever work it takes, and however painful and difficult that work may be, it’s worth it to be able to touch and be touched, to be able to express love and allow ourselves to be loved, with a wide open heart. You don’t need to strive for being able to partake in a “cuddle puddle” with a group of strangers. Not everyone is capable of that level of comfort with touch, and that’s okay. I’m talking about a hug, or holding hands – that’s plenty. A massage is also a wonderful and therapeutic way to exchange touch (if you don’t know how, check out my and Briana’s online video course “Learn How to Massage”!). Be well & take care, Peter [post_title] => The People We Live For [post_excerpt] => [post_status] => publish [comment_status] => open [ping_status] => open [post_password] => [post_name] => the-people-we-live-for [to_ping] => [pinged] => [post_modified] => 2020-11-13 22:04:40 [post_modified_gmt] => 2020-11-13 22:04:40 [post_content_filtered] => [post_parent] => 0 [guid] => http://thedragontree.com/?p=8114 [menu_order] => 0 [post_type] => post [post_mime_type] => [comment_count] => 1 [filter] => raw [webinar_id] => 0 ) [2] => WP_Post Object ( [ID] => 9035 [post_author] => 5 [post_date] => 2023-05-17 15:12:58 [post_date_gmt] => 2023-05-17 15:12:58 [post_content] => When I was in grad school for Chinese Medicine, I’d often see students hanging around campus engaged in related ancient Chinese arts, such as tai chi, qi gong, calligraphy, studying Chinese astrology or feng shui. It was also common to see a group of students hitting themselves and each other. They were training in the toughening exercises of martial arts, which I had never witnessed before. This entailed repeatedly knocking the edges of their shins or forearms against each other, or whacking their bodies with a thick bundle of metal wires (called an “iron bundle” or tetsutaba). As I tentatively tried hitting myself with this implement, one of them told me, “You really want to feel your bones rattle when you do it.” Needless to say, they had lots of bruises. They finished every session by taking out a jug of some pungent brown liquid and rubbing it all over the impacted parts of their bodies. As an herbalist, this was the most interesting part for me. Each guy actually had his own jug of brown stuff, and they often argued about whose was the best. The brown stuff was called dit da jow (AKA die da jiu) which means something like “hit fall wine” and it’s sometimes just called a hit formula or training formula by martial artists. The purpose of the stuff is to help one recover faster after taking a bunch of kicks and punches. It’s made from a variety of herbs, resins, and minerals that have been soaked in alcohol for about a month. Famous teachers and martial arts schools often have their own recipes, many of which have been in continuous use for centuries and are often held in great secrecy. Over years of begging and pleading with my fighter friends and hunting down obscure texts, I managed to procure about a dozen different recipes, then proceeded to spend more years studying them. I had hundreds of jars of my own “brown liquids,” made out of countless combinations and permutations of these formulas. Since most of my patients weren’t fighters I expanded the application to include the various ways we’re battered by modern life – athletics, poor posture, sitting for way too long at a desk, carrying kids around, using backpacks, sleeping on a crappy bed, standing on hard floors, wearing heels, etc. By tracking people’s responses, I gradually moved toward what would eventually be our Muscle Melt liniment. It features a gigantic number of ingredients, but every one is in there for a reason. My high-performance athlete patients regularly tell me that it makes it possible for them to do a super intense workout and be back in action the next day with minimal downtime. If you’re feeling beat up by life, give it a try and tell me what you think. Be well, Dr. Peter Borten [post_title] => Dit Da Jow: Healing Elixir or Ancient Myth? [post_excerpt] => [post_status] => publish [comment_status] => open [ping_status] => open [post_password] => [post_name] => dit-da-jow [to_ping] => [pinged] => [post_modified] => 2023-05-17 16:11:28 [post_modified_gmt] => 2023-05-17 16:11:28 [post_content_filtered] => [post_parent] => 0 [guid] => https://thedragontree.com/?p=9035 [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] => 8579 [post_author] => 3 [post_date] => 2022-03-27 12:00:15 [post_date_gmt] => 2022-03-27 12:00:15 [post_content] => In previous articles we looked at ways to see more dimensions of an issue in order to facilitate its resolution. After sitting a few times with spiritual teacher Leslie Temple-Thurston about 20 years ago, I learned this “squares” approach in her book The Marriage of Spirit and have used it and expanded on it ever since. Rather than seeing “two sides of the coin,” we’d do well to look at (at least) four interconnected aspects to any challenging pattern. While our attachment to one positions tends to keep us stuck, when we see that we contain all of these aspects, this quickly dissipates the intense “charge” around the issue and we can let it go.

You may also be interested in:

Clear Your Blocks to Abundance

The People We Live For

Dit Da Jow: Healing Elixir or Ancient Myth?

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pain body

Growing, Observing, and Opening: Three More Paths to a Long Life

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