But what I am doing with this Kum Nye practice is literally scheduling a time for me to do something which I expect, based on experience, will allow my emotions to flow more evenly, to generate increased calm and satisfaction, and which I have every reason to hope will one day allow quite refined states to flow through me.
Here is what Tarthang Tulku has to say: When we truly use our senses, every part of the body becomes alive
and healthy – mentally and emotionally we become fully awake. We
discover we can experience ecstatic beauty at any moment, as if we were
always hearing
beautiful music or seeing the finest works of art. We are even capable
of healing ourselves, for this relaxation quickens a feeling-tone that
itself becomes a self-generating massage, a system of self-nurturance
that expands and develops.
To be blunt, I think I have a pretty good BS detector. I have been lied to many times, and I think I am reasonably good at spotting sketchy people and practices.
What I have experienced in my own practice, though, has born these claims out.
What I think happens with many people who are suffering from some form of emotional trauma (perhaps I should say, that is more than normal–or better yet, since we all experience trauma and need to to grow as people–UNPROCESSED trauma). Start over: What happens for many people who are suffering from unprocessed trauma, undigested trauma, is they look for comfort somewhere.
Drugs, sex, music and booze are always good candidates in the short term, but they have sizable downsides. So you get into “spirituality”. These are the ex-hippies chanting OM in the ashram. They are the flaky New Age types who collect crystals (I should actually be honest and say I did have a powerful reaction to Scolecite crystal once, but only once) and obsess about astrology.
You talk to them, and there doesn’t seem to be a there there. They are not actually following a spiritual path because they CAN”T until they process all the experiences that are frozen, glued, stuck in the mud inside of them, and their very practice prohibits the sort of open, casual, relaxed but focused exploration needed. They also lack the technology.
I would submit that perhaps the first obstacle to a spiritual path is the believe that life is supposed to be easy, or that following a spiritual path will necessarily make life’s burdens lighter. For some period of time, it may make them worse. It is not pleasant accessing things you had neatly hidden away, locked from consciousness. But you have to clean house to even START. This is my firm conviction. I myself have not even started. On my best days I am getting faint whiffs of what a good beginning might feel like.
But I think once people are willing to do the work–and again there are countless people who profit from helping you postpone this work–they lack a good method. I have lacked a good method. Kum Nye is a good method. I have done courses in Yoga, I’ve done Zazen, mantra meditation, “sitting”, and the like. None of them hold a candle to this work. Not even close. Not in the same city, much less zip code.
Tarthang Tulku (who incidentally is apparently a big of a recluse, and who certainly is not in it for the fame or money) says, apparently in congruence with Buddhists texts, that Relaxation, Mindfulness, and Concentration are three different things, and that what would be an appropriate practice if you had already mastered, say, relaxation, is not if you are still struggling with that entry level barrier. You are not only wasting your time (and this is my interpretation now), but making things worse.
Here again is a link to the programs.
Actually, here are some free programs.
Try it. Stick with it long enough to get results. There could be no gift POSSIBLE greater than the ability to generate deep satisfaction at every moment, and that is the goal. Actually, it likely gets deeper than that, since Nirvana is the end goal, but would that not be much, much, much farther than 99% of humanity ever gets?
Oh, I had an analogy too. Growing feels like turning sideways to my life. I was trying to figure that out. Consider a giant cone, and that your life is traversing one level of the cone at a certain level. You have a rut, and you go around and around and around, never looking up, and only occasionally looking down. You understand down, since we all know people worse off or crazier than us (if you don’t, it’s you); but up is something too slippery to keep in mind too long.
Kum Nye is like looking up, and stepping up, to a higher groove, raising the quality of your experience.