Laying in bed this morning it popped in my head that the capacity to relax–really, to feed oneself, to recover from efforts large and small–means that you are neither hurting inside, nor hurting others.
I feel that all wounds are simultaneously aggressions. All hurt carried inside is nascent or potential violence on the outside. It is a seed with two paths of growth. Ahimsa is only possible with complete individual healing. Deep relationships with others are only possible when one can calmly know oneself. Before you can sense yourself in your body, before you can embody your awareness, you are an abstraction to yourself, which in turn means all other people are also abstractions to some extent. They are there because they are needed, rarely because they are valued for who they are intrinsically.
The question “Who am I?” can never be honestly answered with words, or absent an awareness of body, breath, and emotions (I am here repeating in my own words a Kum Nye teaching, or my understanding of it, at any rate.)
Likewise, any answer to the “meaning of life” which starts as an abstraction is doomed to final failure, since the answer can only be found in a felt sense, and thus exists at a level outside of the possibility of sharing, of discussion, of writing, of the intellect.
I am having some good Kum Nye sessions lately. It is really a very interesting process, which over time amounts to an inventory and processing of the past, as embodied in the present. Things come up, are allowed, are expanded, are accepted, and slowly diminish.
The path of relaxing–and Kum Nye could easily be called the yoga of inner relaxation–is interesting too in that it consists not in adding, but subtracting, at least at my stage. I will notice one day that, as an example, my stomach is not tied up in knots as much as it used to be. Things that used to set me off don’t any more. I am more free of obsessive thinking and worry.
At some point you wonder what do you do when all your constant companions are gone. They have never been my friends, but they have been known.
Time will tell. There are right and wrong ways to do things, and the right way here is to keep going no matter what. I will see soon enough what is over the next hill.