I am fully convinced that what we eat and how we eat reveal a lot of our way of life; but then it was a total surprise this morning when I discovered through a massage session based on the Grinberg method while subjecting my feet to an analysis:
Our feet reveal how we walk through life!!!
The upper part of my feet shows strength, revealing my dynamic action-prone character. The middle part is flat, signalling that I do not retain much of the intensity of the events. The heels are not solid at all, revealing a weak anchorage into stability, receptiveness and passivity. I have never been able to be a crouch potato, and never understand how people could sit for hours at cafés without being nailed to their chairs.
I have never been able to station in any place for long. I find a lot of people too passive, and I have never considered myself having a deficiency in passivity.
According to the massager Marilyn, too much in action could reduce one’s receptiveness. She said I may have an intense life, but if I turn each chapter too quickly, I would not be able to live fully of each intense emotion – positive or negative. It is important to strike a balance between the time to act and the time to feel.
I admit. I surf through emotions of big and small events like surfers on waves, with the unconscious objective of not being swallowed by the waves. Happy moments were exciting but fleeting. During sad moments I tried my best to switch off emotionally.
Marilyn said my heels give a feel of soggy earth, which provokes a vicious cycle in which I feel less incentive to anchor on my uncomfortable heels. She tried to help me evoke past events which might have forged the way I walk through life.
I told her about my childhood in the context of the imminent Vietnam war, then moving to join the Hong Kong family and the unwholesome family saga. I went to Aix for French studies, and later got married. Despite the reputed Provence beauty, I have never felt home in Aix. I quitted married life and Aix in 1996. Then I landed on Lausanne for a job. For the first time, my heart comes home amid the peace of mountains and lakes. But the question keeps haunting my mind, where is the next move?
Marilyn draws my awareness to the fact that the warring Vietnam and the transitory Hong Kong belong to the past. I might have all the valid reasons to jump over the unstable situations without anchoring my feet in those days, but now the situation has changed. I am no more a child depending on the family, and I am living in the safest country on earth – Switzerland! I have never seen things from this perspective.
Am I just repeating my robotic vagabonding and avoiding anchorage out of old fears?
I have always prided myself for my quality of moving forward, of strong adaptation; I thought I was seeking out adventures and it was my choice to be an eternal vagabond. Now I am not so sure. Is it a conscious choice to seek out excitements in the new landscape? Or is it a compulsory pattern of fearing emotional entanglements and deceptions?
Will I be able to call it home from where I am? HOME! It is such a basic thing taken for granted by many, and such an impossible luxury in my eyes!
