What was lost has not gone anywhere. It has been buried - overlooked, covered over by the weight of everything that has happened since. But it is there. The seeking is the finding. In this ninth book of the internationally published Seeking That Which Was Lost series, S Y Kelake offers his most personal work to date - a sustained, honest examination of what it means to find your own centre, and to build your life from it.
Following on from the philosophical and martial depths of The Peaceful Warrior, The Upright moves closer to the bone. Drawing on fifty years of lived experience - a childhood shaped by family violence and a mother's extraordinary courage, thirty years of martial arts practice under the philosophy of the Ren Yi Wu Kwan Tang Sou Dao school, a terminal cancer diagnosis at forty-three that reframed everything, and formal studies in Forensic Psychology - Kelake asks the questions that this series has always been building toward:
Who built you? What did they leave? And what will you choose to build from here?
The Upright is not a self-help manual. It does not offer a five-step programme or a motivational framework. It is something rarer and more demanding: a testimony that the centred life is possible - because the author has lived it, lost it, and found his way back. Again and again.
Rooted in the same tradition as the great teachers this series has always drawn on - Christ, the Buddha, Hermes Trismegistus, PTAH - and grounded in the forensic psychological literature on trauma, attachment, and post-traumatic growth, The Upright is both philosophical exploration and personal memoir. It is the story of a plumb line held steady against everything that pulls you from true.
--- WHAT THIS BOOK COVERS ---
- The whole story: why you cannot find the centre without knowing both extremes, and what the Buddha's life teaches about the danger of a half-told story
- The bad builder: a forensic psychological examination of the armoured person - the abuser, the person consumed by trauma - and the compassion that honest understanding makes possible
- The night bus: one mother's act of courage in the dark, and what post-traumatic growth actually looks like when it is being lived rather than theorised
- The emblem: the complete philosophy of the Ren Yi Wu Kwan Tang Sou Dao school - white, red, and midnight blue - and what the rejection of perfection teaches about the practice of a life
- The diagnosis: what a terminal cancer prognosis clarified, twelve years on
- The practice: what the daily, unglamorous, ongoing work of returning to centre actually looks like - in the training hall, in relationships, in grief, in conflict
- The builder's question: a reflective closing that turns everything toward you - your own architects, your own foundation, your own choice about what to build next
--- THE SERIES ---
The Seeking That Which Was Lost series examines a single, urgent theme across nine volumes: that the conditions for human flourishing - self-regulation, emotional balance, conscious awareness, measured action, inner peace - are not novel discoveries but ancient inheritances that modernity has obscured, discarded, or simply forgotten to transmit. Each book stands alone. Together, they form a map back to the centred self.
I - Seeking That Which Was Lost: Establishing Stability Through Self-Regulation in Youth Justice
II - Pandora's Box Cannot Be Closed
III - Seeking the Martial Mind
IV - The Deviant Soul
V - The Forgotten Self
VI - The Peaceful Warrior
VII - The Sacred Fire
VIII - The Middle Way
IX - The Upright - this volume
"Seeking that which was lost is not a single act of recovery. It is a direction of travel. It is the orientation of a life." - S Y Kelake
