It is commonly believed that feelings are either expressed, which is healthy, or repressed, which is unhealthy. As a child in a family where the expression of feelings was sometimes traumatic, even violent, I couldn’t buy into the belief. It was a matter of survival—I found safety in stuffing my feelings and insulating myself from the moods of others.
Yet I suffered. My introvertedness isolated me from friends and I dreamed of being part of a family where I could feel relaxed and be myself.
Several nights ago I had a dream that told me feelings are always spontaneously expressed. You can’t argue with dream, so I explored the possibility. Is the stereotypical stoic Indian or unflinching martyr showing feeling? Does one person have to perceive another’s feelings in order for them to qualify as being expressed? And what about the often-expressionless wolves in the pack I lived with, or me the hunter masking all intent and feeling when stalking my prey? I couldn’t imagine all of these people destined to lives plagued with ulcers or repression-fueled violent outbursts.
An image came to me of emotional energy being water that flows freely down a stream. A beaver dam impedes the flow and the water pools behind the dam. Lily pads float on its surface, water birds and fish find it a welcome home, and the beaver find it a safe haven by building their lodge out in the middle.
Only if I held on to the belief that water needs to flow in order to be expressive could I see the water behind the dam as stifled. My prey couldn’t read my emotional state, but another hunter could. The same with the stone-faced wolves: when I had an intuitive connection with them, their feelings came through loud and clear. For a few days now, I’ve been experimenting with the awareness that feelings are always spontaneously expressed. Already I notice my increased sensitivity to people’s moods, even though they give me no overt clues. I’m now open to the possibility I have created a monster by believing in stuffed feelings.
I live and work with a group of people who are very conscious of their effect upon others. They work at being nonjudgmental, refraining from gossip, and accepting others’ thoughts and feelings. Yet there is one odd little item that stretches their tolerance.
It started to show itself couple of weeks ago: so-and-so has poor form, so-and-so has her butt way up in the air…looks like a slinky worm…does them too fast. A little regression into tittle-tattling and judging was one thing, but then I overheard an unabashed comparison: “You should see so-and-so’s push-ups—that’s the way they should be done.”
Was there a sacred way of push-ups inscribed on a stone tablet that I was not aware of? Were my comrades members of a secret exercise cult? Or maybe we were just genetically programmed to execute push-ups in a certain way and I didn’t get my full quota of chromosomes.
After contemplating the issue on a (very brief) meditative retreat, I came to realize that my partners were probably still under the spell of their school days sports coaches, who indoctrinated them in the right way—The American Way—to warm up. You know, God, mom, apple pie, and proper push-ups.
I’m happy to report that my friends have joined Push-Uppers Anonymous. They come home from meetings all aglow, talking about how addiction to conventional push-ups can cause repetitive motion injury and asymmetrical muscle development. And get this: a couple of them have gone cold turkey—they’ve sworn off of garden-variety level ground push-ups forever. One of them has the shakes pretty bad, but he says he’ll be alright as long as he doesn’t run into his old coach.
On our training runs, you’ll now see the crew doing push-ups on hillsides, straddling logs, one hand forward, a leg out to the side. And yes, even butts up in the air. I know; you wonder what this country’s coming to. I think we’re good as long as we still have mom’s apple pie.
I encourage anyone who wants to turn his/her life around and get super healthy—physically and emotionally—to read Born to Run by Christopher McDougall and Why We Run by Bernd Heinrich. Along with a new take on human evolution, you’ll learn why there is no substitute for running. Humans evolved as nomadic foragers, always moving, and we naturally stay in optimal health when we do what we are designed to do, the way we’re designed to do it.
The running style presented by McDougall and Heinrich is what we practice here at the Teaching Drum. Every other day, a group of us goes running off trail and through the woods, and we stay in great shape. One reason is that our “run” includes all the bending, twisting, and jumping necessary to go over, under, around and through whatever lies before us. When people ask what we’re up to, I tell them we’re off to do native yoga. Lately we’ve been throwing in push-ups, yesterday we each did 275.
Along with woods running, add a paleo diet, living water, clean air, and low stress, you might hardly recognize yourself after a few months. Even if you think you’re doing well now.
Some people are afraid to come running with us because they’ll incur injuries with light footwear on uneven terrain (we run in moccasins or similar). The truth is we fare much better than running shoe-clad road joggers, 70% of whom sustain injuries in any given year. During my road and trail running days, I ended up spending a total of two years on crutches due to several ankle and stress injuries. With my last injury, I went to a physical therapist to get fitted for an ankle brace. I thought he was joking when he suggested that I get out there and use the ankle as I normally would, only gently to start with. His reasoning was that the ankle, being used, would heal strong and in alignment with the way I used it. Additionally, I would not have to come back for physical therapy to strengthen the ankle or restore full motion.
I haven’t had another injury since I swore off of hard surfaces several years ago. Only I feel guilty for further weakening our economy by steering people away from damaging footwear and useless therapy.
Every day a woman elder followed the path down to the stream to get water, which she brought back in two rawhide buckets on the ends of a pole she carried across her shoulders. One of the buckets had a tear in it, while the other was perfect. By the time the woman made it back to her lodge, the torn bucket would be half empty.
Four turns of the seasons passed, and each day the perfect bucket grew more proud of himself for being able to deliver a full measure of water. “I am ashamed of myself,” said the torn bucket. “I am a failure—this tear in my side lets water leak out all the way back up the trail.”
The kind elder looked over to him, laid her hand upon his damaged, water-stained skin, and smiled. “Have you noticed all the herbs and flowers that now grow on the left side of the trail?” she said. “And look at the Mice and Birds and Butterflies who have come to live there. The right side of the trail is still dry and dusty. That’s because I have always carried you on the left—my gifting side—which is closest to my heart. Rather than seeing you as flawed and arriving half empty day after day, I saw you as half full and overflowing with generosity. You trusted, you shared your gift with your hoop of relations. In the way that giving is receiving, you have made room within yourself for the beauty and nourishment that has come from your gifting. And it is not only you, but the perfect bucket, and me, and so many others we cannot know, who have been bathed in your blessings.”
Popular forms of toning exercises, such as yoga and qigong, along with modern martial arts, are based on repetition and memorization of forms. The approach fits well with our civilized training to be mind-centered and lead repetitive task-based lives.
We are designed to function differently, as we evolved in the natural world, where nearly every movement is an adaptation to an ever-changing environment. Such movement does not originate in the mind, and we cannot rely upon memory to execute it. Rather, we must be in communion with the life around us and attuned to its collective consciousness. We are then able to remain centered and move in a coordinated fashion, ever observing and analyzing as we adapt and adjust like a bough to the breeze.
In such a state, we are fully alive—a functioning organ within an organism. We can carry on a continual dialogue with all that surrounds us. No longer just creatures trained to execute cause-and-effect responses, we begin to see new options presenting themselves. Looking around and through situations at hand, we can reformulate them and come up with creative solutions.
Even more importantly, we’ll find that situations will often evaporate. The energies at play are then freed of their structures and lose their identities, and we can align ourselves with them. We will then know the Zen—the essence—of all forms and movements.
I just did something dishonest—I helped organize a Wolf tracking class and got people from all over the country and Europe to register for it, only I didn’t tell them that all along, I had an ulterior motive.
It all started when I was in my 20s. I lived with a pack of Wolves, and they were my family. I felt closer to them than to the people in my life. Three times people threatened to kill every animal in the pack, and once a group of hunters showed up with rifles-in-hand to do it. Their children were at risk, they said, and the deer herd would be decimated.
The showdown resolved itself without a shot being fired, yet those men left me with a precious gift: they convinced me that the only effective way to change Wolf’s fate was by introducing the public to the real animal behind the big-bad-wolf image. Along with that, people needed to be educated on the vital ecological role Wolves and other apex predators played.
Now Wolves are returning to the Northwest and Southwest, along with regions in Europe, and they are meeting the same fierce resistance they once did here in Wisconsin. Poaching is an issue, just as it was here. A couple of high-profile court cases helped slow it down, but it was mostly changing attitudes that did it. Now our Wolves are doing resoundingly well—they’re moving into what was typically considered marginal territory, and they are thriving.
We who have a passion for wolves can play a helpful role in turning public opinion around. Here in Wisconsin, we now have 30 years of experience running a public relations program that has created an amenable-enough climate for Wolves and humans to coexist. One of our greatest successes is Wolf Awareness Week, a once-a-year-event where Wolf ecology is worked into the natural sciences classes of all primary and secondary schools. Two key figures in the Wisconsin PR program will be participating in the Wolf tracking class, which will offer a prime opportunity for participants to learn firsthand what has worked here and take it home with them.
There, I confessed—now I’ll be able to sleep tonight.
Dreams are more real than reality itself, says Gao Xingjian, recipient of the 2000 Nobel Prize in literature. If that is so, we take ourselves far too seriously. Me, the person who is writing these words, and you, the person who is reading them, may only be shadows of our dream selves. Many inquisitive minds have challenged the Western rational-material view of reality. Plato asked, “How can you prove whether at this moment we are sleeping, and all our thoughts are a dream; or whether we are awake?” In The Tempest, William Shakespeare said, “We are such stuff as dreams are made on;” Edgar Allan Poe mused that “All that we see or seem, is but a dream within a dream;” and Carl Jung thought that we probably “continually dream, but…consciousness makes such a noise that we do not hear it.”
About fifteen years ago, I came to realize that my life was but a dream. Reflecting on past events, I saw that some of them were either foretold or guided by dreams. How much more of my life, I wondered, was connected to my dreams and I was just not consciously aware of it?
I began keeping a dream journal, not of the entire dream, but just a line to capture the main theme. After a couple of weeks, I found that nearly every dream was directly related to my awake time. The more attuned I became to my dreams, the more I realized that in my dreams I was my fully conscious self, aware of my deepest thoughts and feelings and sensitized to those of others. In awake time, on the other hand, I often bumbled along, not completely in touch with myself or my world. However, my dream of the previous night often attuned me to what was going on and guided me through it.
I’d like to share my dream relationship with you. Starting today, January 1, 2012, I will posting my daily dream messages on this blog. The people I live and work with share their dream messages every morning, and we have found the practice to be quite a help in deepening our relationship. Oftentimes we find each other’s dream messages to be personally helpful. On the right-hand bar, you’ll find a dream message posted every day, and below that you can sign up to automatically receive the messages daily. Ultimately, I hope you become inspired to listen to your own dreams and share them with those close to you.
Welcome to the reverse world. As Carl Jung said, “Who looks outside, dreams; who looks inside, awakes.”
Do you suffer from chronic pain? So do I, along with one out of three US citizens, but only one out of eight Japanese. Why the difference? Most chronic pain is self-made, and the way we deal with it is culturally dictated. When pain persists beyond an injury’s healing phase, it no longer has a physiological basis, so drugs and physical therapy can do little or nothing to resolve it. Which of course is no news to those of you who’ve tried.
This afternoon I saw a physical therapist named Robert to get some help for my ever-present sore neck. He examined me and said my neck was fine, that my problem was all in my brain. He had my attention. As he explained why, I nodded in agreement nearly the whole time—he was describing essentially what I had come to realize about chronic emotional pain. We talked for an hour, comparing healing approaches: his to physical pain and mine to emotional pain, and we found very little difference. In fact, what I stated above about chronic physical pain relates to the emotional form as well, so please keep this in mind as we continue.
First, an explanation. Those of you who know me as a storyteller and wilderness skills instructor might be wondering why I would know anything about emotional pain. Anyone who has taught skills in a primitive living situation will tell you that they often end up doing more counseling than anything else. You can’t get very far with skills unless you can guide people through the discomfort thresholds, limiting beliefs, and dysfunctional relationship patterns that typically trip them up shortly after they step out of their comfort zones. In a primitive camp, you have to function independently and responsibly, without the crutches of accustomed routines and escapes. There’s a sign on Robert’s door, “Human primate social groomer,” that could just as easily hang on mine.
Robert and I agreed that chronic physical and emotional pains are both fundamentally incurable. I went to counselors for years before I got fed up with the endless weekly visits and decided to take responsibility for my life. There were a few times when I didn’t think I could make it to my next weekly appointment, so would give my counselor a desperate call. I know numbers of people like I was: they’ve been seeing counselors for years, with no end in sight. Many others who don’t see counselors either self-medicate or use prescription antidepressants. In the past twenty years, the use of antidepressants has increased nearly four-fold—even with teenagers. One in four women between forty and fifty-nine is on antidepressants. I’ve added psychologists and (on the recommendation of my physical therapist) most chronic pain treatment professionals to the ranks of attorneys, politicians, and clergy who enable us with crutches to keep us crippled and limping along rather than helping us take charge of our lives.
Let’s use physical pain as a metaphor for exploring this endless dependency. Most chronic pain, Robert stated, is not the result of injury but of a life where nearly everything we do is repetition-based. We train ourselves to experience an endless loop of pain the same way we train for a routine that makes today no more than a photocopy of yesterday or the day before.
Here’s how it works: when we injure ourselves, we withdraw the injured area to protect it, and pain is our reminder to keep it protected during the healing phase. The pain becomes chronic when it persists beyond the healing phase, and it can do so because it is created in the mind, not the body. This is true whether it’s a headache, back pain, or a sore neck. Nerves in the affected area do not feel pain—they only send data to the brain, which decides whether or not to push the pain button, also located in the brain. Some people with amputated limbs will tell you they still feel pain in that limb (known as phantom pain), and there are others with broken bones and other serious wounds who feel no pain at all. Drugs and therapy do no good, as there is nothing to medicate or manipulate.
Here’s where our repetition-based lives fit in, as neurons that repeatedly fire together, wire together. After my neck injury, I continually held my neck in a position that would minimize the pain, which trained my brain to push the pain button whenever I turned my neck out of that position. Now, long after my neck is healed, my brain still pushes the pain button whenever I turn my neck in a certain way, but now with no neural input from my neck. I have created a self-perpetuating cycle that may never end. The same with emotional pain: after a while those people who keep making me angry or jealous don’t have to do whatever it is that triggers me anymore: their mere appearance—or just the thought of them—causes those programmed neurons to automatically flick the pain switch. Each of us has around forty-five miles of nerves in our body, with a significant part of our circulatory system being devoted to maintaining them. No wonder we can so easily end up being controlled—even victimized—by them.
If I were living a primitive outdoor life, my movements would be continually varied, so neurons wouldn’t wire together. When my neck injury healed, the pain would naturally have left.
However, I lead a hybrid life, where I hold my neck in the same position for periods of time, such as right now when I’m writing. According to Robert, my key to pain cessation—and perhaps yours as well—is to realize that when I hurt, it doesn’t mean I have been harmed. Knowing the pain is all in my head, rather than in my muscles (or emotions), I no longer have to let it limit what I do with my body or feelings. I can resume control of my life rather than being victimized by my pain telling me how to move or feel.
The cure is movement. Rather than reading the pain as a call to limit movement, I’ll now read it as a request to restore full movement. When I move my neck the way my brain warned against for so long by pushing the pain button, I start disconnecting the button’s neural wiring. Even though there is pain, I gently explore the formerly forbidden movement area by allowing my body to intuitively find its own way around it. My body knows what to do: it has the genetic programming from a long evolutionary history of natural movement. Robert stressed proceeding gently, as pushing too hard could cause the brain to further entrench itself in the pain pattern.
“I might not be coming back to see you,” I told Robert as I shook his hand to leave after only my second appointment. “I don’t think physical therapist is a proper title for you: I think you ought to call yourself an awareness coach.” He just smiled and pointed to the sign on the door.
I’m a passionate man—a doer. At the same time, I like to approach change gradually. Too fast and I don’t have time to adjust, which usually results in my efforts backfiring. Or so I thought.
Yesterday I read an article in a health report that claimed 90% of those who were successful at quitting smoking for more than a year did it by going cold turkey—on the spot, on their own, with no supplemental medication or counseling. Impressive sounding, but not very believable. After all, everyone knows that those who quit addictive drugs cold turkey break out in cold sweats, hallucinate, and are wracked by insatiable cravings. Besides, how could such a high percentage of people be so successful on their own when most smokers I know are like comedian George Burns, who said that quitting smoking was easy—he’d done it a thousand times.
And what if other smoking cessation methods were as effective as going cold turkey? In 0.46 seconds, Google handed me a dozen solid research reports that all said the same thing: the drug companies were milking the public with their nicotine patches, gums, and whatnot—they showed long-term success rates of only 3 to 10%, with a near-100% failure rate for those making a second attempt. Drugs like bupropion and smoking succession clinics fared better, reaching 30%. Not even combination methods could come close to cold turkey.
While perusing the reports, I came across another statistic: two thirds of smokers would prefer to quit gradually. If only they knew the odds, I thought. And then I realized I was one of them—I too favored the gradual approach. Did that mean I was a failure along with all those wannabe non-smokers?
I reviewed the major changes I had made in my life, which included quitting alcohol and becoming a vegetarian, and I did every one of them…cold turkey. So pass the mayonnaise; I’m now an advocate of cold turkey on rye, cold turkey casseroles, and any other way the long-snubbed leftover can be put to good use.
Why do so many of us of us feel helpless when someone close to us sinks into a state of depression? And why do those of us who experience depression often feel helpless ourselves? I know many people who just want to withdraw and be left alone, or else they turn to medications and therapists.
Both scenarios tell me that we have incorrectly defined depression. People experiencing states of depression usually tell me that nothing matters to them—they just don’t seem to care about anything. Psychologists tell me the same thing: their patients often neglect themselves and shirk their responsibilities. Here we have not an emotional, but an emotionless, condition. Depression, then, seems not to be a state of being, but a disconnect which creates the absence of a state of being.
Therapy for depression is much like trying to correct grammar on a blank page. An editor can sit down with her dictionary, red pencil, and creative writing degree, and still she will find herself staring at only a blank page. She can talk with the wanna-be author about what brought her to this blank-page state and how her fortunes might turn if the page weren’t blank, but nothing can really be done with the blank page itself.
Here lies my contention with a good share of what the mental health profession spends its time doing: applying band-aids to something that doesn’t exist. If therapists were focused on prevention, they would do much better at justifying their careers. At least the medical profession—in most cases—has something to treat, even as shameful as is their lack of focus on prevention.
Mental health is an everyday affair, which means we need to take personal responsibility for our well-being and that of those close to us. There, the pronouncement was easy; and now for the prescription, which is even easier to state. However, practicing it is perhaps the most difficult endeavor anyone could undertake in this day of disempowerment and isolation: follow your heart.
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