Today, walking in the park on a very nice day, it hit me that what keeps us out of the present moment is past momentS. We carry simultaneously many moments, moments of terror, of joy, of loss, of gain.
If you think about it, you can likely quickly access many life-changing or defining moments. The moment your parents told you they were getting divorced. Many moments hearing them arguing, but maybe one moment you really don’t remember until you focus on it, when you started shutting down emotionally.
Perhaps you had something wonderful happen, and you said to yourself “I will never be happier than this”, and your unconscious heard that, and took it seriously.
If you are a soldier, you may remember when you heard you were going to be deployed. Or redeployed. Or reredeployed. You may have PTSD, and many, or certain, moments burned into your consciousness. I suspect your healing will begin with the realization that there are other moments like that in you too, which are simply not as intense. They passed away, and so too can these memories, even if it doesn’t feel that way.
Emotionally, we are aggregates of many moments of heightened sense, heightened emotion, heightened connection, for better or worse.
And I felt this surge of energy and thought that it is time for all my moments to begin to open their doors to one another, to open up a general connection of feeling and emotion, and it felt clear to me that that is how you learn to live in the present, actually.
When you are living in the moment, you don’t know it. You can’t will it, because in the act of observing it, you leave it. I think there are people who talk about “the moment” who sit there thinking: “here I am, living in moment. Fuck I’m awesome.”
Conscious presence is an emergent property of a well organized nervous system and psyche. It is then, in other words, an emergent property of emotional health, which makes psychological work–or let us say, more broadly, energetic release work–the path to it.
Kum Nye literally means to massage your subtle being, your intermediate part between your body and space itself. It is built for this sort of thing.