Can't Harm a Soul

It was a warm day. I was standing on the playground. Out of nowhere and for reasons that I do not know Craig started pounding on me. My parents taught me that it is wrong to hit someone. Punch after punch landed on me. Pain. I remember feeling pain. In my attempt to do no harm in return, I somehow managed to maneuver him into a headlock. When this finally happened, I was so relieved that I wasn’t being punched anymore. He tried to escape from my grasp. I squeezed tighter. Every time he flinched or gave the slightest movement, I squeezed tighter. He stopped moving. I just stood there focused on the relief.  He was tight in my unrelenting grasp with his head protruding out from underneath my right arm for what felt like forever.  No pain from the punches, a silence and a stillness that was such a relief for me to experience. I was a young child, who had no concept of strangulation, or if I had perhaps squeezed so hard that I would or could have broken his neck. To this day, I don’t know why, for some reason that I can’t explain I let him go. The moment I did his fist connected with my mouth and I felt immediate pain and the warmth of blood rushing in to my mouth.  He ran away.
So what is in this for me? What do I get to see from this memory in my life? The physical body is just that. He could hurt my physical self but he cannot destroy, hurt, mutilate, or touch the eternal part of me that cannot be hurt or destroyed. A physical body is what it is… a limited thing with a finite existence. Letting him go from my grasp shows me that at a very early age I understood this idea. I can feel all the emotions of that painful day and still be here to BE HERE. I can take pleasure and feel good in the knowing that I possessed that wisdom from a very early age.  This is something that I need to allow myself to know and remember always.  More importantly, I need to allow myself to BE this daily and in each and every moment of my life.