Energy Post 3: Crushing

The core of this post, which I'll probably summarize first and then write out in longer and more tangential form, is this:

"Crushing." Yes, in the sense of elementary school early romance (if one wants to say that crushing is romantic, in that sense; we should be careful here because our vocabulary can narrow our view and our understanding).

Perhaps related to my extroversion, I crush on people, particularly when conversation is good or even conversational *dynamics* are good. For example, people with genuinely novel gestures when they talk with their hands. I tend to crush on yoga teachers who give me marvelous adjustments. You'll see already where and how this post, weeks ago when I conceived it, begins to become very problematic.

Questions about "relating" in the yoga room, in and out of one's "relationship," all of that baggage wants to be opened up here. Is one or need one be "energetically monogamous"? Are those energies even the same? Need they be? How can we tell? A thousand questions open and challenge some of our big categories and particularly, some of our set limits (or, our history's or our culture's or our gender's limits, or some mix of those, personal and politic both).

But I don't want to go into all that mess at the top.

The essence of this is that I don't believe that this energy, let's call it "relating energy" rather than something already-reductive like "sexual energy" (how blase and tired-sixties would THAT be, you know??)----this energy is not unidirectional or even binary, but is AT ONCE and simultaneously multiple and uneven, tending rather than targeting. Imagine an amoeba somehow balanced on top of a broom.

The name of the game for me is not "restricting" any given attraction or crush, or "redirecting" that energy to another goal, but feeling out, prior to any gating off or channelling, fully feeling out WHERE the energy is, being aware of its shape and texture and even weight.

This will sound, of course, like some kind of woo-woo madness. "You feel the energy's WEIGHT? What the hell, Patrick? Put the crack pipe down, my friend."

So for me the great weakness of writing a post about energetic crushing is that we immediately reduce the scope of our energetic understanding by even NAMING this "crushing," because the energy is bigger than that, more interesting than that, although that is one tendency, one sort of magnetic pull on the broom-balanced amoeba. This is why no one on earth can write an interesting blog about "sexual energy" and the yoga practice. It all becomes, "I have achieved more balance in that domain"---yeah, exactly. BOOORRRRIIIINNNGGGG.

Things I do want to take up, a bit, with this, but later (and not in this order):

a. energy blindness. People can be receptive but unaware, which is dangerous.

b. manipulation. Energy connoisseurs (as Freeman once put it) have to be CAREFUL with the energy they manipulate, particularly when around the energy unaware, because "connoisseurs" are not free of energy unawareness. I think that many cults are run on a combination of the energy-blind in charge, along with the energy-blind over-devoted.

c. narrow vision. Crushing, which is a potential expression of energy, is more familiar to us than, for example, "feeling the energy's weight," and so what we feel is the Tendency To Move Toward Familiarity, rather than the Real Strangeness of Reality, which leads to accusations like "you made me feel this!" and then see danger, above.

d. the varying receptivity of yoga teachers to this kind of energy management. To use two examples: Kino is much more receptive to energy crushing than Swenson is. Swenson is a riot and you can tell when he respects and in a way loves your practice, but you are NOT getting close through that humor. Not in the sense of standoffishness, but very much in the sense of defending against simplistic energy crushing.

e. taking care of your own energetic business. THIS, in a way, I think, is a major goal (yes, I said goal) of long-term yoga practice. This should NOT be understood to say, keeping all of the energy clean and safe, because an energetic world that is clean and safe is also probably free from interaction with Reality, and that's not what we want. Ethical questions emerge IMMEDIATELY under the surface of this, and then we are properly dealing with real energy and real circumstances. In Trungpa-ese, we are handling what really matters.