Kum Nye

As I mention from time to time, I really like this form of meditation.  It is intelligent.  It evokes feelings and teaches you to process them.  It is in that sense eminently practical.  I have not done Vipassana, but in my understanding it consists in the awareness, but does nothing to evoke something to be aware OF. I did mantra meditation for a long time back in my youth, and have tried Zazen and the “just sitting there” forms of meditation, and none did anything but wind me up.  Counter-productive, as I suspect is the case for all people not already relatively well adjusted.  That, in any event, is what I read is often the case.

We are complex, rich beings.  We are like cabinets with countless drawers and shelves, and filing spaces.  Personal growth consists in the first phase in simply coming to know ourselves as we are, to open everything up, to see it, to become acquainted with it.  The spaces within us have unique and distinctive textures and feelings.

You have to have motion to open things up, and you have to have stillness to allow it to speak. Kum Nye has both.  Uniquely, in my not inconsiderable experience.

Today, between my last post and this one, I did my practice, and in the fifth part of this set of exercises, I was bringing my negatives into my “cloud”, and a Mr. Hyde sort of figure came up, and told the part of me that is loving “I always hated you and wanted to hurt you.”  “I”–I hate to identify with that other part of me, although I recognize in principle I must–asked why.  And it showed me that it needed love for a very long time, but had no way to get it.  And anything we need but can’t get we grow to hate.  It is natural for unloved people to grow to hate love.  Something tantalizing but 6″ out of your reach is maddening.

The nature of trauma is that the more you need people the more you push them away. Some part of you knows that your very desperation makes you intrinsically vulnerable, intrinsically gullible, intrinsically prone to error and the manipulations of others.  The harder you reach, the harder you pull back.  It is one more of the contradictions of loss and emotional privation.

But my two selves went for a pleasant walk in a pleasant park, and I think they worked something out.

There can be no greater gift, no skill more worth developing, than the ability to truly love oneself.  Once you can do that, you don’t NEED people, and so the desperation and clinging disappear, and so the ability to approach other people appropriately, in a spirit of welcoming and openness becomes available.

My life’s tasks are developing this ability in myself–I am nearly there–and then figuring out how to teach it consistently and efficiently.  That is one of my life’s tasks anyway.  Any regular readers I may have know I have set some other modest tasks in addition to that.