Certainly, there is survival value in this. In the wild, or in combat, or in a hostile environment, constant vigilance is needed.
But I think the way to do it is how animals do it. They are completely relaxed most of the time UNTIL some signal appears to them. They are not waiting for the signal, but respond when it appears.
If you can’t relax effectively, you can’t work effectively. This is what I have concluded.
Peter Levine, on a related note, talks about how fear and anger and sadness and every emotion we are capable of feeling actually FOLLOW kinesthetic sensations. The knot in your stomach becomes what we call fear. It happens first.
This opens up an extraordinarily interesting possibility: by attending to our bodily sensations, by listening to them, feeling them, opening them up, challenging them, investigating them, we gain control of emotions. We become able to get all the good things emotions give us–fear, for example, being a signalling mechanism that something is wrong–without having to go into them fully.
Further, we become sensitive to and better able to feel those sensations that give rise to the feelings we want, like belonging, emotional satiety, contentment, happiness, pleasure.
I have been attending particularly to feelings in my solar plexus lately, and it is astonishing how quickly I am becoming more optimistic and sensitive to feelings of space.
And what I am realizing is that these sensations give rise not just to feelings but to thoughts. Thoughts are the products of unprocessed, unaccepted, unrecognized physical sensations.
Ponder that most meditation seeks to attain a thought-less state. How can this be done when the body is not fully integrated? This is the genius of Kum Nye. Peter Levine is the first mainstream author I have seen mention this system. Kum Nye necessarily precedes meditation. There have been a number of reports that meditation actually makes many people more agitated over time. Why?
I would guess that the underlying body energy remains unmodified, but its expression in thought is eroded, so it has no outlet. It gets bottled up. To be clear, this energy is not positive, but until it is identified and “pulled in”, it remains.
And I think of a Sartre, who was compelled to write. I think of intellectuals, compelled to think, even if everything they think turns to disaster, as happened with most French intellectuals of his period.
This is unidentified traumatic energy, unprocessed horror and sadness, which is remembered viscerally, and which comes out in both emotion and thought.