From “Emotions Are the Path”, on “The Dao Bums” online forum site:
My emotional state usually has a sort of positive uplift to it, if I’ve taken care of my health. If the positive uplift goes missing, then I find I need to revisit recent experience, oftentimes to review what belongs to me and what belongs to someone else, so far as the intention in the events that have transpired.
At the same time, I realize that the sense of a positive upwelling in my being is in part a function of my posture and carriage. It’s been a life-long endeavor for me, to realize the relaxed posture and carriage inherent in my being, at least from time to time. To the extent that I have succeeded, I feel a little more at home in my body.
My long-term memory has always been poor. Last night and this morning I realized that maybe it’s not so much that my long-term memory is poor, as it is that I didn’t feel at home in my body much, growing up. There’s a kind of uneasiness present with the memories, and that makes it difficult for me to access them.
Folks seldom talk about kinesthesiology on Dao Bums, and I can understand that. I’ve had very good fortune to have been able to find the studies and the cases (many of the cases being just practical kinesthesiology) that guide my current practice. I want to say that there’s a reason those Renaissance figures we all admire secretly dissected corpses (or in the case of Gautama, sat in the graveyard and noted the stages of decomposition).
I would have to say that overcoming the uneasiness I felt in my youth was my principal motivation to undertake a practice. That I can see the uneasiness in my early memories now, I think speaks to the greater ease that I experience these days, and I owe a large part of that to the studies and the cases. As difficult as it is to discuss the way the stretch of ligaments give rise to activity, or the way the displacement of fascia supports the spine, I think that’s a part of emotions as a path too, especially in consideration of all the ways these physiological phenomena have been alluded to in the literature over millennia.
Emotions as road signs, on the path of life. Is that the same as emotions as a path?