Musashi's Dokkodo (The Way of Walking Alone)

Teacher:
People often come to the mistaken conclusion that we are always
supposed to be happy and never sad. At all, ever… But, our brains
simply do not work that way. The idea of only being happy is as
ludicrous as thinking you can only swing forward. When you push a
child on a swing there is forward motion, but once that reaches an
extreme end of the arc the child will begin to swing backward. Ocean
tides come and go. Sound is a vibration, crests and troughs.
Everything in life is a vibration of this sort, a pendulum as it were.
Emotions are not really different from all of these. Joy is felt, but after
a time we will lull back into our normal resting state. In exactly the
same way, when a healthy person is sad, they will be sad for a time
and eventually return to their normal resting state. We may want to
only feel joy and never be sad, but this is not going to be possible for
any of us. Even the most positive person you know has bad days
and times when they are sad. It is just a fact of life.
We feel sadness during a loss or separation, it happens. When we
try to deny it, we create an even bigger problem. What are the
common ways people try to cover up unpleasant emotions? Booze
or sex or food or drugs.
The emptiness is still going to be there, whether it was caused by
separation or loss or anxiety. You are going to have to face that
emptiness at some point, and when it is dealt with there is going to
be sadness. It does not go away until it is faced and felt. This is why
the ways listed above which are used by people to avoid their feeling
always fail in the end. Once you sober up or wake up or crash, the
sadness is still there waiting for you. These emotions are how our

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brain deals with things like separation and loss. If we are going to be
healthy, we will have to allow ourselves to deal with these things the
way our brain knows how. It is in denying the feeling of sadness that
people eventually become overwhelmed by it. This can and does
quite often lead to depression.
And what happens when someone is diagnosed with depression?
The doctor prescribes happy pills! These medications typically block
the receptors in the brain that allow a person to feel sad, or
otherwise the pills change the very chemistry of the patient’s brain.
This is the exact opposite of what should be done in a great many
cases.
If you are sad, feel sad. If you are happy, feel happy. Make no
excuses for either state of mind. Emotions are not permanent states.
They are part of the experience of living. Carried to extremes, most
emotions turn harmful. In the same way that sadness turns into
depression, so too a feeling of love can turn into an obsession. Love
is good and healthy, obsession most certainly is not.
Of course all of this is assuming the person in question has healthy
brain chemistry in the first place. There are a great number of people
walking around who have chemical imbalances, and it takes a
qualified person to diagnose these things.
In the style of Chinese Martial Arts that I practice, Hung Gar, the
highest and most treasured form is called the Iron Thread form (Tit
Sin Kyun). This form is very complex in that you have many different
things going on at once, five elements, animals, sounds, etc. But for
this subject, I will refer to the five emotions that are expressed in the
form: (1) happiness, (2) anger, (3) worry, (4) sadness, and (5) fear.
Throughout the form we transition from the expression of one
emotion to the next and to the next and so on… These emotions are
expressed through sound and movement.
For a time in my late teens, I was embarrassed by some of the parts
of this form. As I grew up, I wanted to find the significance and gain
an understanding of why these features and actions were in the

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form. When I searched for the significance of this, it always came
back to the fact that emotions are like ocean waves, they come and
go. You cannot hold onto them. They are experienced and then they
are gone. If you can take that lesson to heart, then you do not need
to fear feeling sadness over separation.