Working With Emotions

Practices have much to offer, but only if you know to look. For example, the rail can teach about emotion.

Emotions are felt, not thought. All this idea of talking about emotions, misses the point about learning to actually feel them. You can spend years talking about emotions, and never get anywhere in terms of developing your relationship to them.

Movement practice gives a pragmatic means of working with emotions.

For example, the rail introduces a specific emotion: the fear of falling. It’s palpable. You can pave over this sensation with reps, or you can observe it, and when you do, you start to understand its nuances.

The vector of development isn’t to stop experiencing emotion - it’s to sense the subtleties within it, to notice how they affect your totality, to be able to accept these emotions without disengaging, and ultimately to use them as they are meant to be used: carriers of meaning.

This doesn’t stay within the practice session. When you go about your day, you will recognize emotions hiding in plain sight, the richness of the emotional landscape unlocked.