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[post_content] => As we descend into darkness at this time of year, our attention is naturally drawn to the light. As with many things of value, we notice it more when it seems to be going away. When you illuminate your tree, light the candles in a menorah, or throw a yule log in the fireplace this season, I hope you’ll take the opportunity to meditate on darkness and light.
Darkness is a metaphor for all the parts of ourselves and our lives that we fear or resist. We banish these aspects to the shadowy corners of our minds where we can avoid reckoning with them. But rather than remaining contentedly neglected there, they tend to weigh on us, as if we’re being followed by a murky figure or a long-procrastinated task. In this way, they infringe on our freedom.
Have you ever felt completely free? Not just in the ability to do or say what you want, but free in the sense that there is nothing you are trying to avoid. Nothing. It is supremely peaceful and powerful.
A starting point could be the non-avoidance of anything within the small range of thoughts, feelings, and surroundings in your current experience. The next step is to venture a bit into the darkness. Depending on what you’ve got stored in there, it can feel quite daunting. But the thing the makes all the difference is that you’re allowed to bring a light with you.
I happened upon this realization during an involuntary visit to my own darkness, and I’ll bet you’ve had a similar experience – even if you didn’t realize it at the time. For me, the darkness came without a conscious request for it, and there I was, resisting it with all my might, feeling I would never find my way out of it.
Suddenly, a little drop of curiosity fell into the dark. There was a tiny impulse that felt different from the fight and despair. There was a part of me that was just a teensy bit curious about the dark. And as I brought my attention to this curiosity, a thought arose: “Where did this come from?”
I didn’t get a clear answer to that right away, but I could feel that the question opened something; my consciousness wasn’t wholly dominated by aversion anymore. So I gave myself over to the curiosity. It wanted to venture into the shadows. Like a cat in a room with a box, it couldn’t resist.
I saw and felt some unpleasant things, but only a fraction of what lurked in the recesses of my mind was connected in any rational way to my own life. Most of it was fabricated from a vast collection of disturbing thoughts and images – just a lot of “what-ifs.” As in, What if I have to experience [insert undesired scenario here]? As I went deeper, these what-ifs were more existential, like, What if I lose myself? Or, What if I’m wrong about everything? If I let my mind run away with what I encountered, I felt aversion and discomfort again; but as long as I stayed curious and open, I could perceive the insubstantiality of these thoughts and I remained in a state of relative peace.
After a while, my attention returned to the curiosity itself and its origin. I was conscious that I was looking into the darkness, but it occurred to me that people can’t see in the dark. Even cats, whose eyeballs are excellent at making the most of a few photons, can’t see in total darkness. So, there had to be a light source here. But where was it?
“Where is the light coming from?” I asked inwardly. And this time the answer was clear.
It was coming from me.
Not from my mind, but from my Higher Self – from that One Awareness that is the same One Awareness that you access whenever you allow your consciousness to expand beyond your thoughts.
This realization made the light grow brighter. As I looked into these undesired stories of my shadow self, I began to see lightness even within them. They became less substantial and they started to fall apart, liberating facets of me that I had denied. At the same time, knowing I had this light, the darkness felt less forbidding. I started to experience a certain softness and stillness in it.
I pulled back at first, because the stillness was disconcerting. It felt like what I would have imagined death to be. But then I revived my curiosity and stayed with it. And I could perceive the dark stillness as an infinite container, holding everything, and it was the most peaceful thing. Also, I remembered the many accounts of near-death experiences I had read, virtually all of which focus not on darkness but on the presence of light and an inexorable movement toward it.
I began to see that this light is a source of freedom. The recognition of one’s light brings an assurance of not needing to avoid anything. This assurance is further bolstered by the recognition that the light isn’t something separate from us. We can forget about it, but we can’t lose it entirely because it’s what we are.
As I was coming out of this experience, I saw a succession of memories – times like this when I had been rescued from despair by my own light – and I got an answer to that first question as a word formed in my mind: grace. I hadn’t really understood the meaning of grace before, but here it was. The Divine reaching down into the muck of my confused mind with a candle.
During these dim days, I encourage you to be curious about the darkness. Rather than switching on all the lights in your home, let yourself be aware that we’re approaching the Longest of Nights. The world needs to rest, to bask in the stillness.
What has been banished to the darkness of your mind, yet nonetheless encroaches on your freedom? Can you enter your darkness? Can you perceive the light you bring with you?
As a final note, I’d like to direct you to the continuity of light in human traditions. For millennia, one torch has lit the next. Each Yule log was removed from the hearth before burning completely, so that it could be used to kindle the next log the following year. Similarly, when lighting a menorah, the tallest candle, representing the Divine Light, is ignited first, and from this one the others are lit.
When you engage in merry making this year, notice the ways you carry forth a light that was kept alive by those before you. What happens when you stay conscious of your light as you interact with others? Where is your luminescence most needed?
Be well,
Dr. Peter Borten
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[post_content] => When our four-year-old daughter came home from her first day at a Montessori preschool, she handed me a swatch of cloth with several buttons sewn neatly onto it. “Where did you get this, sweetie?” I asked.
“I made it!” she exclaimed proudly. She also informed me that she had chopped apples with a “grownup knife” and cut flowers with pruning shears.
I couldn’t believe it. This girl had barely used scissors and never played with a needle before. We weren’t excessively protective parents, but we had no idea that she was capable of doing tasks like these (without hurting herself even). Part of the secret, we learned, was the mixed-age class. In a group of kids ranging from three to six, the older ones were instrumental in inspiring and instructing the younger ones. The teacher explained that when a child sees an adult perform a complex task, she won’t assume she’s capable of doing it herself. But if she sees another kid do it, she naturally thinks, “I’m going to do that, too!” This is one of the many ways I’ve been inspired and instructed by children – and it has informed how I work with adults.
When my wife founded The Dragontree, we wanted to provide a space for people to relax and heal. It wasn’t until some years later that we recognized a shared ambition to support people in whole-life wellness, which includes helping people to discover and actualize their potential. But while a young child may assume she can do what another child can, this isn’t always true for adults. We see other adults doing great things and often think, “I don’t have what they have.”
Most adults have old, fixed ideas about their capacities, largely influenced by teachers and parents. The best research on this subject comes from Carol Dweck, who studies childhood learning and self-esteem, and coined the terms fixed mindset and growth mindset. A fixed mindset refers to a belief that one’s ability in a given area, whether strong or weak, isn’t going to change. Thoughts such as “I’m not good with numbers,” or “I can’t sing,” or “I’m not an organized person” all indicate underlying fixed mindsets.
In contrast, a growth mindset entails the belief that, whatever your current ability, you can work at it and get better. Dweck found that kids with growth mindsets enjoy a challenge, are more confident, and have a stronger work ethic. It probably seems obvious that knowing you can improve your lot would be more empowering than believing you’re stuck with it, but we rarely take the time to investigate and question our deepest beliefs.
Indeed, one of the tricky things about changing a fixed mindset about, say, your skill at math, is that you may also have a fixed mindset about your inability to change your mindset! (“It’s just the kind of person I am!”) Thus, there’s a something of a catch-22 here: in order to shift from a fixed mindset to a growth mindset you must have a growth mindset around changing your mindset. However, I find it useful to remember that these two configurations – fixed and growth – aren’t equally valid. It’s not a case of “different but equal.” A fixed mindset is inherently incorrect. Though we may fiercely insist that it’s true, it’s not. We can change. We can grow. We can improve. Always.
In his 2014 TED Talk, The Psychology of Your Future Self, psychologist Dan Gilbert teaches that people usually believe they’re unlikely to change much in the future – but they’re wrong. “All of us are walking around with an illusion,” he says. “An illusion that our personal history has just come to an end. That we have just recently become the people that we were always meant to be and will be for the rest of our lives.” It’s true, his studies show, that our rate of change slows down somewhat as we get older, but it doesn’t slow down nearly as much as we believe it will. “At every age from 18 to 68 in our data set,” Gilbert continues, “people vastly underestimated how much change they would experience [in values, personality, friends, and preferences] over the next ten years.” He suggests that it’s easier for us to see how we’ve changed in the past than it is for us to imagine how we’ll change in the future. “Human beings,” he states, “are works in progress that mistakenly think they’re finished.”
So, if the science shows that you’re bound to change whether you believe it or not, why not believe it? A willingness to believe (i.e., hold a growth mindset) moves you from the passenger seat to the driver’s seat. If you believe you’re capable of change and growth, you can be a conscious creator of the life you desire.
A critical factor in making productive change is the recognition and acceptance of your current status. Many of us have a hard time giving ourselves an honest self-appraisal because of our upbringing. If you or your parents were raised during wartime there may have been a “stiff upper lip” policy of denying weaknesses and carrying on stoically.
Later generations faced a different obstacle – the self-esteem movement. In retrospective studies of the movement that picked up speed in the 1980s, Dweck and others found that kids who were always told they were great tended to grow into young adults with fixed mindsets that didn’t serve them. They saw themselves as awesome regardless of the facts or their quality of participation. And the inevitable dissonance that resulted when they underperformed often provoked disillusionment or depression. The fixed aspect of a fixed mindset implies a kind of rigidity, and thus a painful reckoning when disproven.
I believe it’s important to love and accept oneself completely (what you truly are is awesome) but what happened here might be seen as a form of “bypass.” Rather than help kids to face their deficiencies, we decided it was favorable to pretend they didn’t have any. The self-esteem movement, at least when understood and applied shallowly, aimed to help kids believe in themselves by giving them a gold star no matter what. The “participation trophy” is a good example. How can we grow (or track that growth) if we aren’t honest and accepting of our actual starting point?
Now, let’s get back to that disparity between adults and young children. In our work through the Dragontree to facilitate the emergence of people’s greatness we’ve encountered so many folks who see themselves as fundamentally different from (i.e., inferior to) those they see as great. I’d like to challenge this belief.
While Dweck’s research deals mostly with intelligence and success, we feel the growth mindset also applies to things like our capacity for healing, happiness, power, spiritual connection, and love. For instance, beliefs such as, “There’s no soul mate out there for me,” “I don’t have a connection to a higher power,” “I’m going to be sick for the rest of my life,” “I don’t have what it takes to change the world,” and “I’m just not an optimistic, light-hearted type of person” all reveal fixed mindsets and are therefore untrue – except perhaps in this moment.
If you feel an urge to emerge – to come into your power and make a positive difference – but something is holding you back, I encourage you to first unearth the fixed mindsets that are undermining you and challenge them. If it feels like too much of a stretch to completely reverse a negative belief, start by “trying on” a minor shift in a positive direction, coupled with an openness for things to get better. For example, if you’re mired in “I’m going to be sick forever,” trying to replace it with something like “I feel like a million bucks” may produce some cognitive dissonance; your mind may simply not buy it. But beginning with a statement like, “I allow myself to heal,” is harder for your mind to argue with. And even if a negative belief about yourself is factual right now, holding a growth mindset entails admitting that you don’t know what will happen in the future. Thus, a very small nudge in the direction of growth might look like replacing “I’ll never meet my soul mate” with “I haven’t met my soul mate yet.”
If you don’t believe you have what it takes to be great, answer me this: what do think is the actual, measurable difference between you and, say, Martin Luther King, Mother Teresa, Mahatma Gandhi, or Rosa Parks? Were they smarter than you? You can learn. Were they more spiritual than you? You can open yourself to that realm of experience. Were they more dedicated than you? You can begin a consistent devotion to your dreams right now.
This last point is worth emphasizing. In order to be a conscious creator, you need to be able to hold a vision of the change you wish to see. That is, you need to hold it consistently until it’s actualized (and then update it as needed and continue the practice). For many who are mystified as to why they’re unable to bring about the changes they desire, the answer is as simple as this: they keep changing their mind and/or getting distracted. If you notice you’ve been doing this, don’t punish yourself for it (we live in incredibly distractible times); just recognize it and get back on track.
Finally, if you have trouble believing you’re capable of greatness, it may be worthwhile to journal about “What is greatness?” Greatness isn’t the same as fame and it doesn’t require breaking world records. (I’m not trying to convince you that even if you spend your life doing bong hits and playing Nintendo, you can still be great in your own way. Let’s be real here.) Human greatness may not have a universal definition, but I believe it’s much more common than we recognize. There’s greatness in storytelling, greatness in healing, greatness in communication, greatness in teaching, and greatness in feeding the poor. There’s greatness in the smallest of places.
I’d love to hear your feelings about greatness and living to your potential. What have your challenges been? How have you overcome fixed mindsets?
Be well,
Peter
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[post_content] => So much of what we do through The Dragontree – both at our spas and with our products, courses, and articles – is meant to assist people to prioritize self-care. In an age when many people barely take a minute in a day for pure self-care, I’m happy to hear of any way in which someone is making space in their life for wellness. And also . . . if I could be a little nitpicky about it, I’d wish for even more Self in people’s self-care.
From talking about it with my patients, I’ve gathered that most people’s idea of self-care includes things like grooming, bathing, exercise, eating well, and perhaps reading a book in a cozy chair. These are all good and important, but it’s possible to do them without really getting to what the Self needs, and we can perform these activities without any conscious care. I’ve even known people whose die-hard approach to yoga was ultimately more stress-inducing than it was nourishing.
Care implies listening – quieting the mind and being open to understand what is needed. If someone handed you a crying child and said, “Care for this child,” you’d probably drop what you were doing – both physically and mentally – and ask something like, “What’s wrong?” Then you’d just listen. And perhaps you’d next ask, “What do you need?”
I don’t mean to imply that grooming can’t be self-care. But let’s think of self-care as comprising multiple layers. On the surface there are the things you do to maintain your appearance, your general health, your ability to function in society, and your composure – bathing, eating, sleeping, haircuts, etc. The next layer contains the deeper (or higher, if you prefer) measures of maintenance that enable you to manage your challenges and thrive. Perhaps this means taking time to forgive, to process your relationship challenges, work on your communication skills, clean up interpersonal conflicts, deactivate your buttons, define and pursue your (worldly) dreams, discipline your mind, etc. Most of this falls within the realm of “self-help.”
And then there’s an even deeper (or higher) layer of self-care that’s could be described as making space for your Essence. That is, letting your Self (AKA the Consciousness that you are, your Divine nature, Spirit, God, your Highest Self) be recognized and listening to it. (By the way, I make no promise that there are only three layers. There might be seventeen layers. My point is that self-care can address the form or the essence or both.)
Take a break from giving your attention to your mind, your emotions, your pain, your grievances, or any of the other content of your life. Instead, notice the container that holds it all. Or, as Adyashanti says, “Turn your attention upon itself.” Your attention – whose attention is that? Turn the focus of your attention around to notice the source of that attention.
The container that holds all the contents of life – all the thoughts, feelings, events, all the objects of your attention – that container itself, the Space, is You. Many spiritual teachers assert that it’s actually much more your true Essence than any of its contents. The contents are fleeting. The container – Consciousness itself – is eternal. The deepest self-care is the practice of trusting in it. Surrendering to it. Relinquishing everything to it. Even if only for the duration of a single breath.
If you need help integrating self-care into your routine and you live near Portland or Boulder, consider getting a membership with us so that you’ll have a structure that you can designate for care of your Self. Leave everything at the door and be present to each moment for its own sake.
If you don’t live near us – and even if you do – a daily practice is likely to yield the greatest transformation, and you don’t really need to make time for it. You just need to make Space for it. Several times a day, give the whole of your awareness to a single breath (or a couple breaths). Once in a while you might ask yourself, how much of my awareness did I give to that breath? I just took a breath between that sentence and this one, and I’d say I gave 83% of my awareness to it. Notice that. Does it change over time?
Sometimes, try doing it without stopping whatever else you’re doing. Watch your breath while you are in conversation, while eating, while showering, while driving, and especially while doing the other forms of self-care. Although getting a pedicure might be a relatively superficial form of self-care, if you are completely present to it, it becomes true Self-care.
Little by little, your Essence will be a growing presence in your everyday life. You won’t get wrapped up as easily in drama. Jiddu Krishnamurti said, “My secret is . . . I don’t mind what happens.” This is the case when Essence, rather than ego, is in the driver’s seat.
Be well,
Peter
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[post_content] => As we descend into darkness at this time of year, our attention is naturally drawn to the light. As with many things of value, we notice it more when it seems to be going away. When you illuminate your tree, light the candles in a menorah, or throw a yule log in the fireplace this season, I hope you’ll take the opportunity to meditate on darkness and light.
Darkness is a metaphor for all the parts of ourselves and our lives that we fear or resist. We banish these aspects to the shadowy corners of our minds where we can avoid reckoning with them. But rather than remaining contentedly neglected there, they tend to weigh on us, as if we’re being followed by a murky figure or a long-procrastinated task. In this way, they infringe on our freedom.
Have you ever felt completely free? Not just in the ability to do or say what you want, but free in the sense that there is nothing you are trying to avoid. Nothing. It is supremely peaceful and powerful.
A starting point could be the non-avoidance of anything within the small range of thoughts, feelings, and surroundings in your current experience. The next step is to venture a bit into the darkness. Depending on what you’ve got stored in there, it can feel quite daunting. But the thing the makes all the difference is that you’re allowed to bring a light with you.
I happened upon this realization during an involuntary visit to my own darkness, and I’ll bet you’ve had a similar experience – even if you didn’t realize it at the time. For me, the darkness came without a conscious request for it, and there I was, resisting it with all my might, feeling I would never find my way out of it.
Suddenly, a little drop of curiosity fell into the dark. There was a tiny impulse that felt different from the fight and despair. There was a part of me that was just a teensy bit curious about the dark. And as I brought my attention to this curiosity, a thought arose: “Where did this come from?”
I didn’t get a clear answer to that right away, but I could feel that the question opened something; my consciousness wasn’t wholly dominated by aversion anymore. So I gave myself over to the curiosity. It wanted to venture into the shadows. Like a cat in a room with a box, it couldn’t resist.
I saw and felt some unpleasant things, but only a fraction of what lurked in the recesses of my mind was connected in any rational way to my own life. Most of it was fabricated from a vast collection of disturbing thoughts and images – just a lot of “what-ifs.” As in, What if I have to experience [insert undesired scenario here]? As I went deeper, these what-ifs were more existential, like, What if I lose myself? Or, What if I’m wrong about everything? If I let my mind run away with what I encountered, I felt aversion and discomfort again; but as long as I stayed curious and open, I could perceive the insubstantiality of these thoughts and I remained in a state of relative peace.
After a while, my attention returned to the curiosity itself and its origin. I was conscious that I was looking into the darkness, but it occurred to me that people can’t see in the dark. Even cats, whose eyeballs are excellent at making the most of a few photons, can’t see in total darkness. So, there had to be a light source here. But where was it?
“Where is the light coming from?” I asked inwardly. And this time the answer was clear.
It was coming from me.
Not from my mind, but from my Higher Self – from that One Awareness that is the same One Awareness that you access whenever you allow your consciousness to expand beyond your thoughts.
This realization made the light grow brighter. As I looked into these undesired stories of my shadow self, I began to see lightness even within them. They became less substantial and they started to fall apart, liberating facets of me that I had denied. At the same time, knowing I had this light, the darkness felt less forbidding. I started to experience a certain softness and stillness in it.
I pulled back at first, because the stillness was disconcerting. It felt like what I would have imagined death to be. But then I revived my curiosity and stayed with it. And I could perceive the dark stillness as an infinite container, holding everything, and it was the most peaceful thing. Also, I remembered the many accounts of near-death experiences I had read, virtually all of which focus not on darkness but on the presence of light and an inexorable movement toward it.
I began to see that this light is a source of freedom. The recognition of one’s light brings an assurance of not needing to avoid anything. This assurance is further bolstered by the recognition that the light isn’t something separate from us. We can forget about it, but we can’t lose it entirely because it’s what we are.
As I was coming out of this experience, I saw a succession of memories – times like this when I had been rescued from despair by my own light – and I got an answer to that first question as a word formed in my mind: grace. I hadn’t really understood the meaning of grace before, but here it was. The Divine reaching down into the muck of my confused mind with a candle.
During these dim days, I encourage you to be curious about the darkness. Rather than switching on all the lights in your home, let yourself be aware that we’re approaching the Longest of Nights. The world needs to rest, to bask in the stillness.
What has been banished to the darkness of your mind, yet nonetheless encroaches on your freedom? Can you enter your darkness? Can you perceive the light you bring with you?
As a final note, I’d like to direct you to the continuity of light in human traditions. For millennia, one torch has lit the next. Each Yule log was removed from the hearth before burning completely, so that it could be used to kindle the next log the following year. Similarly, when lighting a menorah, the tallest candle, representing the Divine Light, is ignited first, and from this one the others are lit.
When you engage in merry making this year, notice the ways you carry forth a light that was kept alive by those before you. What happens when you stay conscious of your light as you interact with others? Where is your luminescence most needed?
Be well,
Dr. Peter Borten
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