Teaching Ka

I am slowly but surely getting through the required reading for my Lomi Lomi workshop the first weekend in May. It's called Urban Shaman, A Handbook for Personal and Planetary Transformation Based on The Hawaiian Way of the Adventurer by Serge Kahili King, PH.D. (Whew!) Today in my reading I am learning about the Hawaiian concept of the Ku, which is basically what we would call "muscle memory". King discusses emotions in the context that they are actually just memories. Either genetic memories passed to us from our genetic ancestors, or experiential memories that we pick up over time. We learn that when someone hits us, we feel emotions about it, anger, fear, shame, etc. We learn that when someone hugs us, we feel emotions about that too, support, love, joy. We learn a great deal of these emotions quite young, they stick with us and later in life the emotions we experience in familiar situations, good or bad, are triggered by memories of how we learned to react the first time we experienced them.

I found these two paragraphs particularly moving today:

"No one walks around full of anger. But people do walk around dwelling on memories that keep re-stimulating anger, or with muscle tension that suppresses memories which would release anger if they were brought to conscious awareness."

"...if emotions are generated by memories of how to react in given situations, then one way to indirectly control emotions is by changing the memories."

This makes a lot of sense to me, observing how my work effects others and receiving massage myself. I also have to recognize what a strong personal effect memory has had on my life, and that in the last few years I have done a lot of work with my own memories of situations, trying to transition certain memories that have a very strong physical effect on me, to ones that are less potent, with a good amount of success. I can't say exactly how I did it, though it has a lot to do with repeated reflection on the positive aspects of my memories and replacing past memories with new ones that are similar in nature but have positive emotions associated with them. In other words, recycling the memory by experiencing similar enough situations that have many positive emotional qualities to them. I am interested to see how this method compares with the technique taught in further chapters of this book.

Cognitive behavioral therapy much!!??! ha!