Taoist Mood Management
Moods are an interesting phenomena. The ancient Chinese didn’t talk much about moods in their mind-body-spirit medical system. They talked about the five feelings: anger, excitement, melancholia, grief and fear, each corresponding to malfunction in the energy field of the liver, heart, spleen, lungs and kidneys respectively, but moods as entities, the way we see them in the West, entities that come upon us as if from the outside, these they’d more likely associate with malign spirits or winds needing release from the meridian circuitry.
Moods are actually an aspect of the drama we generate compulsively in the front of the brain and whether they do indeed come upon us from without, are generated from within or a little of both, there exists a failsafe mechanism for releasing yourself from them in a jiffy.
It consists in appreciating you are not the mood you’re feeling. This may seem obvious. But when you’re gripped by a mood, you instinctively identify with that mood. You become the mood.
Knowing you are not the mood is the first step.
As soon as you’ve differentiated between the two of you: knower and mood, you are in a position to exercise your options: perpetuate the mood or disengage.
Disengaging implies being able to drop back into the midbrain and observe rather than be all up front and unable to discern where you end and the mood begin.
It means being able to accommodate the mood, along with its associated feelings in the front of the chest and belly, and its accompanying thought-loops in the forebrain, in the manner of someone accommodating a pack of unruly kids playing in the front yard, while you remain relaxed in the living room.
Once you’ve mastered this subtle yet radical trick, no mood will ever grip you compulsively again, unless of course, for whatever reasons, you want one to.
Meantime, I wish you absolute freedom from moods, from preferences and from anything that might otherwise obscure your radiant divine light from self or others as you work, rest and play today (and tonight).
Love, D