“A way of response is not a place in your body. It is a function of your life.”From Yoga del Descenso · Libro Puerta
This time I want to begin with an observation of yours, not mine.
If you have been watching yourself for a while, perhaps you have noticed that some responses repeat in ways you recognize. In some people it is the breath, again and again: it is usually the first thing to change, the one that gives warning, the one that keeps you company. In other people, or in other stages of the same life, what draws more attention is the voice, the belly, the gaze, the chest or movement.
And the honest question is this: what do we do with what you have observed?
The easy thing and the true thing
The easy thing would be to declare that you have discovered your “channels.” We are not going to do that. There is a sentence that guides this whole territory of the body, and here it protects you more than ever: Presence does not have to travel through your body for your body to respond to it.
That your experience becomes visible through your voice does not prove there is a conduit of the voice. It shows something more modest and more interesting: that your way of responding has a shape, functions that, for now, stand out.
Those patterns, the functions through which a response tends to become visible, I call pathways of response. They are not places or conduits. They are functions of your life, the kind you already know because you live them every day.
A mirror to recognize yourself in
Let us walk through the main ones, not as a catalogue to memorize, but as a mirror.
Breathing is the one you already know, the bilingual one. Your breath may deepen, grow quiet, shorten or change rhythm. Sometimes those changes coincide with inner states that are very clear to you; other times they answer to entirely ordinary causes.
Seeing. In some experiences the first thing to change is the way you look: the eyes rest, the gaze stops jumping from thing to thing and settles, and you have the impression of seeing more slowly, as if someone had just cleaned the window of the same old room.
Listening. There are seasons when silence becomes almost audible, when music touches you more deeply than usual, when noises you used to ignore now weigh on you, for better and for worse.
Speaking. The tone that changes, the throat that may feel tight in moments of great emotional charge, the words that sometimes cost you and other times find their way out, slower and more your own. And its silence too, those seasons when you have little wish to speak.
Assimilating. The belly as a way: appetite and digestion may change in times of tension, of calm, of withdrawal or of great change in life. The image of “digesting an experience” helps us speak about integration, but it does not turn every digestive change into a spiritual message. Here medical care weighs double: what persists is looked at by a doctor before it is interpreted.
Bonding and generating. The territory where life joins with life: tenderness, desire, care, the wish to create. In some people the deep seasons show here first, either as a greater capacity for closeness or as a passing need for withdrawal in this too. Both appear in what people tell, and neither is a sign of anything on its own.
Letting go. Clean tears, long sighs that come out on their own, the exhalation that brings relief. And its domestic version, which many people recognize with a laugh: those deep seasons when you suddenly need to empty drawers, give away clothes, put the house in order. Letting go inside and letting go outside sometimes arrive together.
Standing in your axis. There are moments when your posture orders itself with less effort and that very everyday feeling of “being in my axis” appears. I note it as an experience of the body, not as proof of an invisible spiritual axis. A backache is still, first of all, a backache.
What stands out can change
Not all of these functions draw attention with the same frequency in every person, or in every stage of life. That does not make you a spiritual type. It is only a way of describing how you are responding now. And no function is higher than another: whoever recognizes mostly the breath is no further along than whoever recognizes mostly the belly.
Recognizing what stands out in your stage gives you three concrete things. Self-knowledge, because you understand why your process looks the way it does and you stop expecting it to resemble anyone else's. Vocabulary, because “in this stage, almost everything becomes visible through my throat” is a sentence that saves whoever is accompanying you half an hour of explanations. And a finer attention, because knowing where you tend to respond lets you observe with more care, which is not the same as watching yourself under a magnifying glass.
And I leave you two freedoms, signed and sealed. What stands out can change with the seasons of life: someone who today mostly recognizes the breath may, during a grief, notice the belly more, and later return, or not. And there may be seasons with nothing recognizable, when everything is diffuse, and that says nothing either. A function that repeats does not, for that reason, become your spiritual identity. Your experience rules over the map I offer you. Always.
They are inhabited
The pathways of response are for observing yourself and telling your story, to yourself, to whoever accompanies you, and to your own journal, if you keep one. But they do not serve as proofs. A tightening in your throat does not prove a spiritual process; a change in your breathing does not either. The ways organize responses; they do not certify causes.
Nor are they places to be worked on. I am not going to teach you exercises to “activate the way of the voice” or to “unblock the belly.” Not because the body does not deserve care, it deserves all of it, but because that approach turns the functions of your life into mechanisms to operate. And there is no higher way, no complete combination, no card of ways to fill in. Whoever collects ways has fallen into collecting phenomena with a new vocabulary.
One more note, because honesty asks for it. Centuries ago, the traditions of yoga developed maps of a subtle anatomy in which channels called nāḍīs appear. Those maps belong to their own context, their language and their doctrine. I do not draw the pathways of response from them, nor do I claim they are the same thing. The resemblance can be studied; the equivalence is not presumed. The technical study of those correspondences belongs to the Libro de la Morada.
What I ask of you here is much simpler than any technique.
The ways are not opened. They are inhabited.
You breathe, you look, you speak, you let go, with more attention, not with more technique.
From Dr. Zuluan Orion's book Yoga del Descenso · Libro Puerta · Part VII