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In last week’s article on the origins of Mother’s Day, I mentioned connecting with the earth as a means of feeling supported in a motherly way. This week I’ll explain more about that earth/mother connection.
The earth is a mother to all lifeforms who live upon her. She births them and sustains them. In animistic traditions, the plane above us – sometimes known as Father Sky – tends to have a rather ethereal influence on our lives. But Mother Earth’s role is decidedly tangible. She gives physical form to a soul and feeds her young from her own body.
In Five Element philosophy, the Earth Element governs nourishment and growth. The internal organs corresponding with Earth relate to food intake, digestion, and distribution of nutrients to all parts of us, like our inner mother. Earth also presides over our ability to give and receive nurturing, support, comfort, and understanding – to others and ourselves. Compared to Fire, Water, or Air, Earth is very slow to change, and such is the quality of a mother’s presence – like the solid ground beneath our feet, her support is constant, enduring, unconditional.
The Earth season is late summer – the time of harvest – and the Earth phase of any process is when we reap the fruits of our labors. It offers us an experience of abundance, of fullness, of having all our needs met. It’s the role a mother serves for a baby. And a woman’s pregnant body – round and full in the belly and breasts – parallels this phase beautifully.
Just as the Earth has a powerful gravitational pull that keeps us rooted, our mother, too, has a certain gravity. We are drawn to her through a bond that began nine months before our emergence. We run to her as children for comfort and nurturing. And after leaving home to strike out on our own, we are drawn back to visit her and recharge this link. Like the earth, she provides us a sense of home. Throughout our lives, our mother is often the one around which all the children and grandchildren gather, for as the Earth, she is our center.
Speaking of the center, our navel marks our personal center of gravity, and it’s a permanent reminder of our oneness with our mother – the closest connection two humans can share. It’s also a vestige of the most perfect nourishment we have ever had. As such, it is a very important point in acupuncture, Qigong, and other systems of traditional healing.
A woman once came to me for help with incessant vomiting and diarrhea. It was as if the Earth Element within her was in utter turmoil. She had tried a wide range of drugs, but nothing made a difference. She was emaciated and lethargic – at five feet eight inches, she weighed only seventy-eight pounds. Her cheeks were hollow and her eyes were sunken. The acupuncture and herbs I gave her barely helped. Eventually, I decided to try a somewhat obscure treatment: centering the umbilical pulse.
If you press the fingertips of one hand into your navel, you’ll probably feel the pulsation of your abdominal aorta. And if you feel more closely, you may notice that the pulsation is strongest above or below, or to one side of the navel. The goal of this treatment is to use physical manipulation to move the pulse so that it’s most powerful right in the middle. I succeeded in moving her pulse, but to be totally honest, I had little belief that it would do anything.
So, I was astonished when she reported the next week that her digestion had improved dramatically. Over the coming months, her episodes of diarrhea and vomiting diminished almost to zero, and she began gaining weight. When I last saw her, she was strong and muscular and weighed 135 pounds. Such is the power of restoring our center – our Earth, our inner mother.
Each of the Five Elements is expressed as a virtue when we embody it in a healthy way. The virtue of Earth is integrity – meaning a quality of being whole, entire, and undiminished. When the earthen banks of a river have integrity, water rushes through them but they remain stable without eroding. When an earthen building has integrity, it can be battered by wind and rain for centuries without crumbling or washing away.
The initial shock to our sense of wholeness occurs through separation from our mother in the act of birth and the cutting of the umbilical cord. Our mother’s womb is our homeland, and we will never return to it. After the fundamental separation that occurs through birth, we are usually cared for and held closely, but gradually this connection becomes more distant. Can you remember the feeling of being always held, enveloped in your mother’s arms, cradled, protected, understood, comforted, and safe? Can you imagine how it would feel to let yourself be held again by someone big enough to carry you easily and take care of all your needs? Even though this separation is completely natural and, as children, we play a role in the distancing process, there’s no guarantee that it will leave us feeling capable of recognizing and meeting our own needs, or able to ground and center ourselves.
When Earth is out of balance in us, we may experience it as a feeling of neediness or hunger. We may have an erratic routine, erratic energy, or erratic digestion. We may feel insecure and become excessively clingy. We may feel a need to mother everyone – every injured worm in the garden, every guy whose mother never taught him to cook – and we may do so at the expense of nourishing ourselves. We may use consumption of all kinds (food, clothes, data, etc.) to ground ourselves. We may try to elicit sympathy from others, feeling a need to always tell our story, yet never being fully understood. Underlying all these feelings and behaviors is a belief that we’re not quite whole, and as it drives us to search for something outside ourselves to fix us, it greatly undermines our freedom.
But it’s not true. What you are is undiminishable. The hole you feel is an illusion created by a misunderstanding about what you are and how you’re nourished. Perhaps you’ve closed your eyes to your resources and given away your power by buying into the idea that you need approval (maybe your biological mother’s, maybe your own) to be complete. Perhaps you’ve hardened your spiritual “stomach” or locked your spiritual “teeth” – refusing to accept nourishment and even creating something that looks like a hole in yourself. But there’s really nothing missing.
It’s fully possible to restore your integrity, to feel whole again. As I wrote last week, an important step is to recognize that your ability to access the qualities of Earth (wholeness, nourishment, groundedness, stability, sufficiency, belonging, being understood and at home, etc.) doesn’t depend on anyone else. If that seems like a giant philosophical leap, you can begin by opening yourself to the idea that at least it doesn’t depend on any single person. You can be supported in these ways by any good friend or family member, and by your own Higher Self. You can nurture yourself and get your own needs met. Observe a practice of gratitude. Notice all the ways in which you are held and provided for. Notice all the ways in which you have enough and are enough. And open yourself to receiving all that’s coming to you. You are worth it.
Be well,
Peter
[post_title] => There Isn’t Really a Hole Inside You: The Earth Element and Your Inner Mother
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Once upon a time, I was finishing an intake with a new patient and I semi-jokingly asked her, “Is there anything else I should know before I stick needles in you?”
“Yes,” she replied, “I don’t have a second chakra. An intuitive healer told me so.” I was living in Portland and I remember thinking this exchange would have been perfect for a scene in Portlandia.
But she seemed genuinely concerned about it. Imagine where your mind might go if someone you trusted told you, “Everyone has a set of vital energy centers. They’re thought to be instrumental to your health, happiness, expression, and spiritual growth. And you’re missing one of them.”
I was reminded of this conversation when a friend told me of a similar experience last week. She had taken her daughter to get a massage, and at the end of the treatment the therapist stated that he had picked up important information about the girl which he felt compelled to share. According to his intuition, her daughter had some significant internal and developmental health issues. However, he didn’t quite know what they were or what could be done about them.
I’ve been on the receiving end of similar comments myself. I once visited a Chinese massage therapist to see if he could help my tension headaches. After working on my back and neck, he felt my pulse and gave me a grave look as he spoke the only five English words of our session: “Your lungs are very weak.”
Another time, I bumped into a woman at a party who looked familiar. It turned out she was a cashier at a little organic co-op where I often picked up a morning snack. She said, “Hey, you’re that afraid guy!”
“Excuse me?” I said, feeling very confused.
“A bunch of us watch you come into the store and you barely say anything,” she explained. “We talk about how you’re too terrified to speak. We’re like, ‘Here’s the fear guy’ when you come in. What are you so afraid of?” She looked well-meaning but smug. The idea that I didn’t make more small talk because I was full of fear felt completely off the mark to me.
I recall not hiding my displeasure well and I said something like, “I’m flattered that you’re all so concerned, but I think you’ve misread me.” However, I couldn’t help thinking, Am I unknowingly giving off some kind of fearful vibe? – just as I also fretted, Is there something wrong with my lungs? My friend had a similar reaction. Despite having always thought of her kid as healthy and robust, she’s now wondering if she should get her specialized medical testing. And the woman I mentioned at the beginning was worried about the problems that might result from lacking a second chakra.
I think it’s great for people to develop and utilize their intuition, but I also think it’s important to practice what Buddhists call right speech or sammā-vācā. The scriptures of Hinduism, Buddhism, and other religions include instructions on when and how to speak in a way that contributes positively. These instructions can be pretty well summed up by three succinct questions that were taught by Rev. James Haldane Stewart (1778-1854) to be asked of oneself before speaking: Is it true? It is kind? Is it necessary?1
If the practitioners and cashier mentioned above had sincerely asked themselves the first question before sharing, they may have concluded that they didn’t really know for certain that their hunches were true. And then, no one would have heard anything about a missing chakra or weak lungs.2 However, they might have responded, “Well, it feels true to me,” which brings us to the next questions.
Is it kind? There’s a bit of personal discretion in determining what’s kind. When the intuitive healer decided to tell the woman she had no second chakra, perhaps he thought, “This is kind because it will enable her to get the help she needs,” or, “This is kind because she can understand herself better with this information.” However, without providing any solution or direction, it wasn’t kind – and that goes for all the other cases above, too.
Finally, is it necessary? Does the other person need to know what we might say? One could argue that all sorts of harmful communications are necessary, but if we’re really honest with ourselves about this criterion, most are not.
Of the three questions, this one could be unnecessarily restrictive if we were to apply it robotically. Of course, it’s not necessary to deliver a compliment or to express one’s awe at the beauty of the snow, so this leads us to a fourth useful question (of unknown origin, but often attributed to Indian holy man Shirdi Sai Baba): Does it improve upon the silence? Again, it’s a matter of personal opinion, but if we were to consider before opening our mouth, “Is this likely to degrade or enhance the atmosphere?” it’s not too difficult to predict.
For people who are reasonably self-aware, there’s a single question that gets to the root of all four of the above. Before you say something that’s likely to have an impact on another: what is your purpose?
Is your purpose to help? To cause pain? To impress? To prove something? To provoke conflict? To connect? To love? I would guess that part of the purpose – if not the sole purpose – behind all the questionable communications discussed above was to appear magical or unusually insightful in order to gain power, respect, or approval.
I’ve focused on these cases because of how often I’ve encountered people who seem to believe that having a feeling about someone means their interpretation is true and must be shared. But of course, these aren’t the only kinds of communications that are made for less-than-noble purposes.
In looking at my own poor communications, I’ve realized that my most common offense is to crack jokes that aren’t funny or appropriate. My purpose has been mainly to generate warmth between me and the other person (usually my wife) or to bring lightness to the atmosphere. When I’ve failed at this purpose, it’s often been because I was actually serving a secret, ulterior purpose: to make myself feel comfortable. When I’m committed to a purpose of fostering warmth and lightness, it goes differently. There may still be jokes – eventually – but I have to begin with a willingness to be totally present for the other person – even if it’s uncomfortable.
I encourage you to try this over the coming week:
- Bring more attention to the things you say to others. Just notice your words and the energy behind them.
- Try to perceive the impact your words have. These first two steps can teach you SO much.
- See if you can pause before you speak – even if just for one second. In this space there’s a moment to align yourself – a moment to make sure the words match your true intention. You could ask yourself, “Is it true? Is it kind? Is it necessary?” or the simpler “What is my purpose?” But even if you forget to do this, try to still practice step 2 – perceive the impact of your words. If it’s not a favorable impact, you can still ask yourself if your words were true, kind, and necessary, and you can retrospectively figure out what purpose you were serving by speaking as you did.
If you’re on the receiving end of a communication that feels unproductive (or worse), you can try asking, “What’s your purpose?” Not everyone can receive that question and give you a heartfelt response, but it can serve as an opening to a more authentic exchange (which should also include being responsible for your own feelings and interpretations).
As I tried to express earlier in this article, sometimes we can allow others’ perceptions of us to affect us even if they have no qualifications and even if we don’t really care what they think. A simple statement like, “Are you feeling run down?” or “You seem to be carrying around a lot of anger,” can get your mind spinning and cause you to feel something’s wrong.
Remind yourself that people project their feelings on each other all the time and people are simply wrong a lot. If someone is intuitive enough to pick up something really important, hopefully they’re also intuitive enough to recognize how it would affect you to tell you this information.
Finally, when someone tells you something about yourself, it’s useful to run it through your own intuition. Does it feel true to you? If you have trouble accessing your intuition, I recommend you join my wife’s group, Love Rising. She helps people develop this faculty.
In this age of “fake news,” social media, and presidential communications being made via Twitter, it’s more vital than ever that we practice discernment with what’s coming in and we become clear about our intentions before we speak.
Be well,
Dr. Peter Borten
_____________
- These three questions have also been (probably erroneously) attributed to Rumi, Buddha, Socrates, Shirdi Sai Baba, and others – though this attribution is apparently because these teachers all had similar things to say about right speech. I haven’t been able to find proof that anyone but Stewart asked these questions in these exact words.
2. The question Is it true? can be asked on different levels. In an absolute sense, it could be argued that it’s impossible to know anything objective for certain (see The Work of Byron Katie, John Locke, etc.). This would cause one to always answer “no” to the question of truth, and to hence refrain from ever speaking again. I believe Stewart meant it in an everyday way – i.e., would most reasonable and kind people agree that it’s true? – and I think that’s sufficient for most cases.
[post_title] => Like Medicine or Bullets: Our Words
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Today is Giving Tuesday, a global day to come together to support the causes and organizations we care about.
The Dragontree values it's clients and the community that supports us all, and we believe that global change starts with community contribution.
Personally, we believe there's merit in anonymous charity - that way you know you're not doing it for status or recognition, and there's no bond of debt between the giver and the receiver. However, we've decided it's worthwhile to explain how we give as an organization so that our clients can see where some of their money goes, and more importantly, so that we can vocally advocate for GIVING and hopefully inspire you to do the same
.
We believe that each individual, every being, and the earth itself deserves love and care and we've dedicated ourselves and our business to that end.
We start by shopping locally: Whenever possible we utilize local businesses and locally-made products. This minimizes the resources and environmental impact of shipping and maximizes the amount of money that feeds our own community.
We reduce, reuse, and recycle: Used oil from shirodhara and other oil-based treatments we provide is donated to our local bio-diesel company, so they can turn the oil into useable fuel. We are continually looking for ways to reduce resource and energy consumption. We procure supplies with minimal packaging and maximum post-consumer content. And we reuse and recycle and compost as much as possible.
We donate: Every year we give away thousands of dollars in spa services and our Apothecary products to support nonprofits and charities. We also gather donation items, volunteer our time, and participate with the communities of these nonprofit organizations to help them find relaxation and peace so they can continue to do their incredible work. Our company partners with charities that are doing good in our communities such as Friendly House and Emergency Family Assistance. We volunteer our time to help them succeed in their work, and we support our employees as they do the same with the causes that they value.
We raise funds for meaningful causes: This year we donated all of the profits from the launch the Dragontree Life Coaching Program to The Well Life Foundation. The Well Life Foundation is a nonprofit organization we founded to help low-income women break the poverty cycle by providing the means to build fulfilling and sustainable careers in life coaching; and to fund community-based projects that help women in difficult transitions when and where they need it most.
On this Giving Tuesday, we encourage you to take 3 actions to support the causes you care about.
You might:
♡ Donate money or items
♡ Share the cause or organization on Facebook, Instagram, or Twitter
♡ Share the story of why you care
♡ Volunteer your time
♡ Encourage others to give or volunteer
♡ Anything else that supports your organization or cause
What will you give today?
Love,
Peter and Briana and Everyone at The Dragontree
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In last week’s article on the origins of Mother’s Day, I mentioned connecting with the earth as a means of feeling supported in a motherly way. This week I’ll explain more about that earth/mother connection.
The earth is a mother to all lifeforms who live upon her. She births them and sustains them. In animistic traditions, the plane above us – sometimes known as Father Sky – tends to have a rather ethereal influence on our lives. But Mother Earth’s role is decidedly tangible. She gives physical form to a soul and feeds her young from her own body.
In Five Element philosophy, the Earth Element governs nourishment and growth. The internal organs corresponding with Earth relate to food intake, digestion, and distribution of nutrients to all parts of us, like our inner mother. Earth also presides over our ability to give and receive nurturing, support, comfort, and understanding – to others and ourselves. Compared to Fire, Water, or Air, Earth is very slow to change, and such is the quality of a mother’s presence – like the solid ground beneath our feet, her support is constant, enduring, unconditional.
The Earth season is late summer – the time of harvest – and the Earth phase of any process is when we reap the fruits of our labors. It offers us an experience of abundance, of fullness, of having all our needs met. It’s the role a mother serves for a baby. And a woman’s pregnant body – round and full in the belly and breasts – parallels this phase beautifully.
Just as the Earth has a powerful gravitational pull that keeps us rooted, our mother, too, has a certain gravity. We are drawn to her through a bond that began nine months before our emergence. We run to her as children for comfort and nurturing. And after leaving home to strike out on our own, we are drawn back to visit her and recharge this link. Like the earth, she provides us a sense of home. Throughout our lives, our mother is often the one around which all the children and grandchildren gather, for as the Earth, she is our center.
Speaking of the center, our navel marks our personal center of gravity, and it’s a permanent reminder of our oneness with our mother – the closest connection two humans can share. It’s also a vestige of the most perfect nourishment we have ever had. As such, it is a very important point in acupuncture, Qigong, and other systems of traditional healing.
A woman once came to me for help with incessant vomiting and diarrhea. It was as if the Earth Element within her was in utter turmoil. She had tried a wide range of drugs, but nothing made a difference. She was emaciated and lethargic – at five feet eight inches, she weighed only seventy-eight pounds. Her cheeks were hollow and her eyes were sunken. The acupuncture and herbs I gave her barely helped. Eventually, I decided to try a somewhat obscure treatment: centering the umbilical pulse.
If you press the fingertips of one hand into your navel, you’ll probably feel the pulsation of your abdominal aorta. And if you feel more closely, you may notice that the pulsation is strongest above or below, or to one side of the navel. The goal of this treatment is to use physical manipulation to move the pulse so that it’s most powerful right in the middle. I succeeded in moving her pulse, but to be totally honest, I had little belief that it would do anything.
So, I was astonished when she reported the next week that her digestion had improved dramatically. Over the coming months, her episodes of diarrhea and vomiting diminished almost to zero, and she began gaining weight. When I last saw her, she was strong and muscular and weighed 135 pounds. Such is the power of restoring our center – our Earth, our inner mother.
Each of the Five Elements is expressed as a virtue when we embody it in a healthy way. The virtue of Earth is integrity – meaning a quality of being whole, entire, and undiminished. When the earthen banks of a river have integrity, water rushes through them but they remain stable without eroding. When an earthen building has integrity, it can be battered by wind and rain for centuries without crumbling or washing away.
The initial shock to our sense of wholeness occurs through separation from our mother in the act of birth and the cutting of the umbilical cord. Our mother’s womb is our homeland, and we will never return to it. After the fundamental separation that occurs through birth, we are usually cared for and held closely, but gradually this connection becomes more distant. Can you remember the feeling of being always held, enveloped in your mother’s arms, cradled, protected, understood, comforted, and safe? Can you imagine how it would feel to let yourself be held again by someone big enough to carry you easily and take care of all your needs? Even though this separation is completely natural and, as children, we play a role in the distancing process, there’s no guarantee that it will leave us feeling capable of recognizing and meeting our own needs, or able to ground and center ourselves.
When Earth is out of balance in us, we may experience it as a feeling of neediness or hunger. We may have an erratic routine, erratic energy, or erratic digestion. We may feel insecure and become excessively clingy. We may feel a need to mother everyone – every injured worm in the garden, every guy whose mother never taught him to cook – and we may do so at the expense of nourishing ourselves. We may use consumption of all kinds (food, clothes, data, etc.) to ground ourselves. We may try to elicit sympathy from others, feeling a need to always tell our story, yet never being fully understood. Underlying all these feelings and behaviors is a belief that we’re not quite whole, and as it drives us to search for something outside ourselves to fix us, it greatly undermines our freedom.
But it’s not true. What you are is undiminishable. The hole you feel is an illusion created by a misunderstanding about what you are and how you’re nourished. Perhaps you’ve closed your eyes to your resources and given away your power by buying into the idea that you need approval (maybe your biological mother’s, maybe your own) to be complete. Perhaps you’ve hardened your spiritual “stomach” or locked your spiritual “teeth” – refusing to accept nourishment and even creating something that looks like a hole in yourself. But there’s really nothing missing.
It’s fully possible to restore your integrity, to feel whole again. As I wrote last week, an important step is to recognize that your ability to access the qualities of Earth (wholeness, nourishment, groundedness, stability, sufficiency, belonging, being understood and at home, etc.) doesn’t depend on anyone else. If that seems like a giant philosophical leap, you can begin by opening yourself to the idea that at least it doesn’t depend on any single person. You can be supported in these ways by any good friend or family member, and by your own Higher Self. You can nurture yourself and get your own needs met. Observe a practice of gratitude. Notice all the ways in which you are held and provided for. Notice all the ways in which you have enough and are enough. And open yourself to receiving all that’s coming to you. You are worth it.
Be well,
Peter
[post_title] => There Isn’t Really a Hole Inside You: The Earth Element and Your Inner Mother
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