Welcome to the first episode of the Daology podcast! For this inaugural occasion, I briefly introduce Daology (Dao + Logos) then recite a piece of proetry (prose + poetry) inspired by my clients, patients, and students. They teach me so much about life via their personal stories and collective histories.
A common issue and considerable factor that determines our position on the spectrum of wellness or illness is the quality of our relationship to emotions — both our own (primary) and those of others (secondary). These interactions are diverse and dynamic. However, overarching principles apply and underlying processes unfold as a Dao of emotions:
Emotional Emaciation or Emancipation:
From Sealing to Revealing and Feeling to HealingWe begin to suspect our own feelings as wrong and even dangerous after being repeatedly blamed, criticized, punished for expressing them. Especially by authority figures and relational groups who we depended on for survival, meaning, belonging when we were just young, vulnerable, impressionable children.
Thus, reactively adapting to others and adopting their norms, we reliably abandoned our own beating heart due to the undue and unfair social pain and disdain it caused. Estranged from the rest of us, its vital beauty, power, sensitivity was numbed, starved, paralyzed.
However, since the solar soul which illuminates our mortal form essentially longs to dance free in full flow, this psychic amputation projects as disconnected relationships, unsatisfying vocations, fragmented lives.
Ultimately, no one, a guide, any guru, nor goddess is able to unlock this otherwise eternal, infernal, internal quarantine but ourselves. And above all, discovery of self-love is the master key. Each turn of it simultaneously requires and acquires: trust and truth, forgiveness and forbearance, courage and encouragement.
Because we become identically identified with repressed energies from ancient patterns, their catharsis will likely become so temporarily uncomfortable such that we may crave, negotiate, beg to mask up and shut down again. Spiritual surgery to extract old egos is excruciating!
Imagine what can happen when an innocent prisoner unjustly incarcerated for decades is finally released. Spasms of caged rage, grief, anxiety, terror are common and commensurate as the victim is allowed to end a withering jail-cell sentence and enter an enlivening new rebirth. Yet, when the latter becomes too overwhelming, return to the familiar limitations of being behind bars appears more appealing.
The difficult reintegration process — following severe prolonged disintegration — is often disorienting, bewildering, and apparently counterproductive. Things seem worse than ever before! We outright doubt our perception, choice, sanity. But if we can learn to accept and yearn to navigate these waves of emotion as indices indicating motion through purgatory to metamorphosis to resurrection to emergence from emergency then wholeness gradually and inexorably ripens.
Moreover, due to our universal intergenerational inheritance of epigenetic trauma, once we play out our personal drama then there is also accruing karma from past lineages to help pay off. Furthermore, even if that ancestry is cleared, we can build credit to benefit future descendants by nurturing better culture.
We may be wary and it may lay buried, but the way is always beneath our weary feet. And at any time we can reset upon the golden path even if beset by regrets we cannot forget. Yes, none of us escapes here unscathed nor perfected. Yet be not scared nor ashamed for our sacred wounds do not just scar but mark us as wise warriors, holy healers, sublime sages, magic mystics, spirit shamans.
Now, dear Dao friends, fellow earth angels! Let us walk onwards together, head held high, spine spirally aligned, heart broken open, eyes with gaze ablaze.
— Paul C. Wang 玄道 Xuan Dao
Dao of Emotions