A tutor of mine who works as an acupuncturist was treating a woman who, years ago, had fallen a long way and broken her ankle badly. Now fully healed, she had come for a treatment for some other condition. The practitioner needled her ankle, and she suddenly experienced a distinct sensation of falling. The tissues had held on to that experience, and when the traumatised area was needled, the associated sensation returned.
It is a well-known phenomenon in the world of internal medicine. The sternocleidomastoid muscle in the neck, for example, is a storehouse of emotion. In Japanese hara diagnosis, treating sympathetic nervous system dominance by needling San Jiao 9 in the forearm can have the miraculous effect of immediately and palpably softening a tight and tense SCM.
Much has been written on this subject of emotional memory being housed in the body, rather than exclusively in the brain, notably by Bessel Van Der Kolk in his excellent book, The Body Keeps the Score. But is this really the whole story? Let’s try a thought experiment…
You used to ski when you were a child. You did so regularly enough to be quite competent. But you haven’t skied for years. Decades, in fact. Now you’re in your sixties. And you’ve travelled to the Alps to visit some friends. They’re taking you out on the slopes for the day. You’re excited, but also nervous. You don’t bounce like you used to.
Tentatively, you clip your boots into the bindings. You wobble. You lurch and sway. You’re cautious, of course, but somehow your body remembers how to do it. After an hour or so on some easy pistes, your confidence has returned, and your movements are relatively efficient. Not as fluid as when you were young, perhaps, but you haven’t forgotten. You can go where you want, at the speed you want. Crucially, you can stop, too!
Somehow, your body remembers how to do it.
Think about that.
Since you last skied, every cell in your body has been replaced several times over. Every cell in your brain has been replaced, too. You don’t even have the same bones.
But your body remembers how to do it.
Where then, is this memory of how to ski located? From where have you accessed it?
If memory is not in our brains, and it is not in our bodies, either, then where precisely is it?
The Azure Dragon 