I have been traumatized many times. I was traumatized as a baby, as a toddler, as a youngster, as a pre-adolescent and as a teenager. There are specific events and emotional states I associate with all of them. I went through an consciously contacted all these “selves”, which had lived in relative isolation from my conscious awareness, and from each other, until I opened up communication. I told them to communicate any feelings they have, any time.
And damned if I did not get a few weird moments of feeling things I felt when I was, say, ten, and had completely suppressed. It is an odd sense, meeting old feelings anew.
This is a very Kum Nye approach: opening feelings, expanding them, and welcoming them with interest, kindness, and curiosity, no matter their content.
And this afternoon I was feeling good, and got to thinking: there is a parallelism between rejecting bad emotions and clinging to good ones. There is a morphological quality of holding which itself prevents the self organization of the system on a deeper level, and following qualitative adaptation.
If you neither seek to force the emotion of happiness, nor to avoid the emotions, say, of fear and loneliness and sadness and grief, something deeper takes hold. This is in my mind unquestionably at least one of the things Buddhists aim at with the creed of non-attachment.
What I think many fail to grasp is that at root the sense of the spiritual is exactly that: a sense. A feeling, a refined emotion, one which we cannot get if we react to the superficial, outward emotions. You must be calm.
All of this is me articulating in slightly different words what I am being taught in my Kum Nye lessons. I really think anyone who is not feeling bliss 24/7 would benefit from taking up this very nourishing practice. I have preached this often–and convinced one person to do it briefly–but have otherwise failed completely as far as I can tell. But self evidently, I am not driven by a need to manifest success, nor a compulsion to avoid failure. I am driven to learn and explore. This is merely where I communicate what I think I’ve learned.