Abbe Blum is Meditation and Tibetan Yoga Teacher at Nyingma Institute. Nyingma offers residential retreats, evening classes, and weekend workshops in the Tibetan Buddhist tradition.Nestled in the Berkeley Hills, Nyingma is minutes away but feels like a world apart from our stressful urban life.

At the Nyingma Institute for over thirty years, tens of thousands of people from 4 years old to 80 have explored the connection of mind and body that Kum Nye, an ancient form of Tibetan relaxation and healing, makes easily available. Charaka Jurgens, 72, started doing Kum Nye in Berkeley when she was 60. Now 71, she teaches it enthusiastically at Nyingma Amsterdam: "Our heads dominate everything," she says, "and so our feeling and our sensitivity is like the skin of an elephant. Often we don't know what we feel. At the least you can feel your rear end on the cushion." Through the fact of feeling, relaxation starts. You don't have to DO anything to relax ---you just stay with what is going on as much as you can. The Tibetan term Kum Nye refers to massage or stimulation of the subtle body. Through very simple and gentle movement exercises, self massage and self observation, we begin to feel less like thick-skinned elephants and more like human beings whose experience can be joyful and full of ease.

Learning to feel has become important for a group of UC Berkeley students in the Fall "Meditation, Mysticism and Mind" class who came once a week to the Nyingma Institute to find ways to relax and develop their meditation. One of them told me that he had learned patience and was doing better in school because he can now observe what is arising inside: "I don't get uncontrollably upset and react automatically now,‚ he mentioned, ...The relaxation techniques of Kum Nye have helped a lot."

It's really heartening when people whose health is bad can start to help themselves. One seriously ill woman wrote that a profound healing began to take place for her as she reconnected body and mind. With her first Kum Nye exercise ---simply rolling her head slowly and very gently in a circle--- sensations arose that felt better than any massage I had ever experienced.

After a weeklong retreat she left with much more energy and a much better sense of how to take care of herself. That was 8 eight ago.

She still practices Kum Nye.

When we devote ourselves to just a handful of the exercises that Tibetan master Tarthang Tulku has put together for Western students, we go beyond the familiar, catching our basic restlessness, fear and grasping, our attitudes of deep-seated laziness, sneaky versions of not caring. What's amazing is not just that we learn to relax but that we find our own qualities of precision and wonderment in all that we do. We are already works of art in our daily lives.