Sitting still, denying yourself physical movement, the mind’s
instinctive reaction is to retreat into its normal buzzing monologue —
hoping that focusing the mind elsewhere will relieve physical
discomfort. This would normally be the case; normally, if ignored, the
body would fidget and shift, to avoid accumulating tension. But on this
occasion we are asking it to sit still while we think and, since it
can’t fidget, it grows more and more tense and uncomfortable.
Eventually, this discomfort forces the mind back from its chatter to the
body. But finding only discomfort or even pain in the body, it again
seeks to escape into language and thought. Back and forth from troubled
mind to tormented body, things get worse and worse.
Who would want that?
As my Kum Nye practice deepens, I realize that learning to relax is contingent on untying the sorts of emotional knots this author still plainly has a lot of. It is about healing. It is about undam-ing places where the flow of energy (which you can understand as “subtle” or an attribute of the nervous system, as you choose) has been blocked.
Trauma is encoded in the body. It is encoded in how we breathe, our posture (Feldenkrais invented the word “acture”, which I have always liked), the quality of our voices, the “tone” of our eyes, how we walk, what we hear, the dominant expression on our faces.
Trauma is continually reenacted in our habits of being. It must constantly be recreated to maintain its effect on us. Kum Nye is about NOT renewing it, about allowing what would otherwise have been our natural “acture” to emerge as a result of not preventing it from emerging it. You do less, not more.
The point I want to make here, though, is that “meditation” can mean many things, and if you are trying to sit still without constantly working to liberate tied up energies, it is more or less masochistic. I did a mantra meditation when I was in what I call my “Blue Years”, and it didn’t help in the slightest. I think it made me MORE agitated.
Meditation can be a form of repression. You can teach yourself to mechanically calm the surface by learning not to listen to emotions, not to allow them to flow, but you have not healed.
My current lesson of eKum Nye, 2.5, he talks about how you can develop calm and then enter it, and THIS is actual meditation. You have to do a lot of preparatory work to even BEGIN meditating properly. He (Arnaud Maitlin) discusses it here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=2m_Ssa7Fng0
I have felt this calm a couple of times in the past week or two, very briefly. Lesson 2.4 is opening up the navel center, and it brought up a lot of powerful and unpleasant emotions for me. At times it felt like I was being attacked by demons, but this is a familiar feeling for me. This time, rather than resisting it, I went into the feeling fully, and that fog seems now to be clearing. I attained one very important psychological insight that I think is going prove extremely valuable.
On a more general scale, I look at the past 100-150 years (really, it may as well be human history), at Hitler, Lenin/Stalin/Mao/Pol Pot. at “thinkers” like Sartre and Nietzche, and they had none of this. They did not have access to these technologies of helpfulness, of happiness, of contentment, of joy.
All of the problems of humanity have solutions. They can be solved, and they can be solved without recourse to totalitarianism. Those who want to impose their own order on the world are morally and emotionally demented. They are fractured in ways which can themselves be healed through technologies like this.
All that we NEED to know is already known, and much of the most important technology of humanity, the methods of building emotional self sufficiency which eliminates the need for greed and consumption as lifestyles, are known only to very few.
All the billions of dollars we spend on universities is in many respects fully wasted. We do not teach people how to be contented. If anything, we build a sense of entitlement, greed, lust, and anger. Nothing done in any of the Engineering, or Physics, or Social Sciences, or English, or Biology, or Chemistry or any other department is more important than learning contentment.
Quite literally, if we regressed to the living standards of the 18th century but adopted globally the technologies of Kum Nye and Holotropic Breathwork, I would view this as a huge advance. We count progress in entirely the wrong ways.
We can generalize Tibet. We can propagate these insights, these sparks of genius, around the world. Step one is to bring the spiritual into the scientific realm. This is easily done. The empirical evidence is copious. Two, we teach it as normative. We teach kids in school how to process emotions, how to grow spiritually.
If we fail to do this because of emotional mechanical-ness, because of utterly unnecessary stupidity, it will be a tragedy. All tragedies have a hero, and he always has a flaw, a hamartia, something without which everything would have worked correctly. Who is the hero here, and what flaw will doom us?
Science, and fear of mystery–fear, to shorten it to its root.