brief, loosely related notes on unknotting, untwisting, untangling:

(1) There’s sort of a way in which experience accumulates or "tangles up" from the perineum to the crown of the head, over a lifetime. This may have something to do with ontogeny/phylogeny/something of the neural cord/crest, etc., in prenatal development. Around the perineum can be especially tangly. Around the neck can be especially tangly too.

(2) Part of untangling things is something like applying "structure preserving transformations" to "safely move things out of the way" so one can "metaphorically peer deeper and deeper down into the system," as if one was above the head looking down into the neck, down through the volume of the body. It can be like the center of a square of tissue paper is placed on top of the perineum, with a dab of glue securing it to the perineum, and then the tissue paper is "crumpled and twisted upwards through the volume of the body. And so what’s described here is gently untwisting and uncrumpling the tissue paper to expose that anchored part of the tissue (and finally then even that can flow, sort of).

(3) Knotting and tangles can feel like knots and tangles, but also "seams," pockets, bags, crumples, etc.

(4) Unknotting, untangling is a combination of directness and indirectness. The "knot itself," not to "inappropriately reify" a "knot as such," while of course being spatially/experientially nebulous, dynamic, might seem to be localized or semi-localized in "body experience" and/or "inner space" and/or muscle tension and/or some or all of these. And/but, it can be helpful to consider there to be thin tendrils reaching diffusely basically everywhere. So, sometimes, one might focus too much sort of on "the knot itself," but untangling will likely involve a tremendous amount of time "very far away" from the knot. It can be good to balance directness and indirectness. And, of course, these are "leaky abstractions," and "puzzle solving" will ultimately be radically concrete, engaging with the specific, particular details of one’s own life history, mindbody, bodymind, etc.

(5) In addition to "within the body" or "within inner space" (or pocket worlds, or pocket realities, suffusing or entangling with "the world out there," and so on), one might also explore the surface of the body. It can be as if bedsheets or very-high-surface-area, thin parachute material is wrapped around the body again, and again, and again, including through the body, multiple times. This is to give a sense of just how wrapped and tangled things can be. And this can be pretty normal, over a few decades of living! And then meditation is partly a painstaking unwrapping, untwisting of these wrappings and wrappings, slow, shimmery, tingly, undulation or buzzing over large surfaces areas. Just another way it can be like, of many, on and off or over extended periods of time. And so, "untangling" something "seemingly very small," say, in the perineum, or the face, or the neck, etc., might involve sort of unwrapping football-field-amounts of sensation, material, something, to kind of "get all the way down" to unwrapping that small twist. That is "everything" was kind of involved in that small twist.

Note: when I say "unwrapping bedsheets," it's sort of like it slides along the surface, like all this is happening in cylindrical or concentric layers, layers of surfaces, multiple simultaneously layers of cloth sliding against each other in different directions, mostly, until there's only a single layer, and not like sort of "big-unwrapping-ness-es out into space around the body," or something. Just metaphors, though relatable to sensation and experience, sometimes.

[thank you to a collaborator for giving me an opportunity to articulate a chunk of this]