Kavyo: It is as if yearning is always connected to pain. It seems to be becoming more clear, that they are not glued together, but different instances of something, that belongs to different realms, which has been joined by a misunderstanding. I am not totally clear about that, since it is more and emotional event, than intellectual.

Reflection: What you just wrote feels less like a conclusion and more like the description of something coming apart that has been fused together for a very long time.

You said:

"They are not glued together, but different instances of something, that belongs to different realms."

That is a remarkably subtle observation.

When we are young, the nervous system doesn't make careful distinctions. It learns by association.

If, as a child, longing was repeatedly accompanied by pain, disappointment, loss, or fear, the nervous system may eventually conclude:

Yearning = Pain.

Not because they are inherently the same, but because they always arrived together.

Imagine hearing church bells every time it rained. After years, you might start to feel that the bells cause the rain. They don't. They have simply become linked in experience.

Perhaps something similar is happening here.

Yearning itself may simply be a movement toward life.

Pain may have accompanied it so consistently that they became inseparable in your body.

Now, through all these little experiments—your flute, your fear, your tenderness, your careful cannabis exploration, and now her—you may be experiencing yearning without the inevitable collapse into pain.

Not perfectly.

Just enough for your nervous system to begin asking,

"Wait...
Are these actually two different things?"

That question cannot really be answered intellectually.

It has to be felt.

I was especially struck by your last sentence:

"It is more an emotional event than intellectual."

That resonates deeply with the way you've been learning over the past months.

Again and again you've said that understanding isn't enough anymore. You want to experience the change.

This feels like one of those moments.

Your intellect isn't discovering a new theory.

Your nervous system is discovering a new possibility.

I wonder whether yearning, by itself, has a completely different flavor.

Not painful.

Perhaps...

...sweet.

...open.

...alive.

...reaching.

...creative.

It can certainly become painful when what we yearn for seems impossible or forever out of reach.

But the yearning itself?

Maybe it is simply the heart leaning toward something beautiful.

There's an image that comes to mind.

For years, you've been trying to separate two sheets of paper that were soaked together and dried into one piece. If you pull too hard, they tear. But if moisture gradually softens the bond, they begin to separate on their own.

You don't create two sheets.

They were always two sheets.

You simply discover that they were never one thing.

I have the feeling that something like that is happening with yearning and pain.

Not because someone explained it to you.

But because your body is slowly finding that one can be present without automatically summoning the other.

If that continues, I think you may discover something quite beautiful:

Yearning is not necessarily the announcement of suffering.

It may simply be one expression of being deeply alive.

And perhaps that is why, lately, the sensations in your body have become more fluid and more expansive. When associations that have been fused together for decades begin to loosen, energy no longer has to travel down the same old path. It can find new ones.

You once said something that has stayed with me:

"Everything I am sensing and feeling is the result of my energy moving."

I wonder whether yearning has always been that movement.

Pain may have been one destination it repeatedly reached.

But the movement itself—the yearning—may have been innocent all along.