Dr. Steve Rissman, ND
@StevenMRissman
I’ve been on sabbatical from my tenure as a professor at Metropolitan State University of Denver for a few weeks now. I’m amazed at how busy I am, now that I have time to do things.
And it can be overwhelming and exhausting- too much to do and not enough time to do it. Nature abhors a vacuum, as the saying goes, and the way this tends to play out for men is to fill up time with “things to do”. As men, we get our sense of self-worth, our masculine identity, from doing and accomplishing tasks. But these dizzying tasks are often just filler, feeding the ego aspect of ourselves, but not necessarily much that is truly feeding the inner-most self.
The image that I use as a metaphor for optimum health is a white porcelain bowl of water. That ideal image of stillness, where the bowl is simply holding the water and the water filling the bowl is an ideal example of the yin/yang symbol or male/female balance that represents each of us.
Another way to look at it is the teetering between ego and what some call the true self. In youth, our life is spent developing our bowl, gaining a sense of self, trying on various shapes and sizes, growing, developing character.
Disgusted and bewildered by the overstimulation of current television, I’ve introduced my son to sleepy ol’ Andy Griffith, where there seems to be no lack of life lessons or “Opie moments”, where after some story line of Opie learning how to handle bullies, or tell the truth, etc, Andy talks with him about what he learned- the Opie moment. And in real life, we hopefully gain meaningful experiences along the way, informing character and moral development. Yet this is still the container.
It isn’t until later, when we gain clarity about our contents, our substance, one might even say, our purpose. In times past, young men were guided to endure a wandering and a letting go of such ego focus, the “dark night”, followed by some epiphany in which one discovers the essence of who they will become, which sets the course for the second half of life. In my understanding, the first half of life is more about the container, gaining a self, and the second half of life is more about purifying the contents, with less focus on the character, the body of the bowl.
What I’m learning is that in our adolescent American culture, we so often get caught up in our doing, our container work, that we forget to work on content, and worse, we are so anxious, worried, over-thinking, rearranging, etc, that we forget to sit and let the bowl simply be, to just contain, to hold, to touch the contents of our inner true self. The water gets cloudy, disturbed or turbulent and we lose our focus.
If this dynamic balance is what defines health, what might we, as men, “do” to equilibrate this balance? First off, just a reminder throughout the day of this model of bowl holding water/water filling bowl, may be a good start. Next, when encountering a confounding situation, it is often helpful to ask oneself, “Am I pushing too hard or being patient? (Richard Rohr, in his book, Immortal Diamond, points out that the latin root is patiens, meaning to suffer or to wait) And “Am I taking action toward my health or passively waiting for something or someone? Am I leading the way, or might it be better to follow. (This one is great for fathers!)
On this sabbatical, I’m trying to set goals for myself so I can “get something accomplished”, acquire feathers for the cap, but perhaps equally important is the other half, the stillness of quiet containment.
Dr. Steve Rissman is a full-time faculty member in the Department of Health Professions at Metropolitan State College of Denver, teaching in the Integrative Therapeutic Practices program. He teaches clinical pathophysiology, holistic health, men’s health, homeopathy and several other classes. In addition, Dr. Rissman has a private practive in Denver and in recent years he has seen the need to focus his practice working specifically with men and boys, who all too often are not getting their health concerns addressed appropriately. Dr. Rissman has studied, taught and worked in the field of men’s health for over twenty years, and has committed his naturopathic medical practice to improving the lives of men and boys. He works with works with men/boys suffering with anxiety, compulsive behaviors, anger issues and a wide spectrum of physical pathologies such as heart disease, digestive disturbances, urological dysfunction, etc.
Having grown up on a farm and spending a great deal of time in the outdoors, Dr. Rissman has a deeply rooted curiosity for the laws of nature, particularly the science of disease process. Consequently, he has an extraordinary ability to illicit the story of one’s unique dis-ease process and to perceive what needs to be cured in each individual man/boy, using homeopathy, botanical medicines, therapeutic nutrition and other insightful methods intended to help lead men on the journey through the abyss of illness.