Dealing With Tumultuous Emotions

I’m dealing with tumultuous emotions. My daughter-in-law, Michelle, has cancer and is recovering from major surgery. This has all transpired in the past six weeks. My wish is to be available to her and my son in all three centers. Yet my emotions break through at times when I’m thinking or talking to others about her. My training with Mr. Bennett has taught me that reactive emotions are energy leaks, a form of negativity. At the same time, I recognize that my emotions need to be acknowledged and not tamped down. How do I work in this situation? How do I hold my emotion without allowing it to rule me? How can I understand this work for myself?

My resources include a lifetime of practice in the Work.

A woman in a group I mentor thanked me last week for teaching her about blending emotion with sensation. As soon as she said it, I realized that was the work I could turn to when emotion wells up in me. I had forgotten and she reminded me. A gift.

Triamazikamno

On a related front, I’ve been wondering about the Sacred Triamazikamno.  That is, the Law of Three expressed by Gurdjieff as Holy Affirming, Holy Denying, Holy Reconciling. For several weeks this past fall I worked on a morning exercise centered around these three forces. Through the exercise I began to experience something new for myself about Holy Denying.

My automatic connection to the word denying usually carries a flavor of something resistant, or outright negative. I will NOT. I can NOT. I Won’t. To put a positive spin on it I can relate to denying as receptive, which lends a female flavor. But wait, there is another side. Think Isometric exercise, an analogy for working that I like to use. Without the resistance, we can’t build the muscle. Without the Holy Denying, there can be no Holy Affirming. They need each other to manifest their own properties. And without the friction of the two—Holy Affirming and Holy Denying, there is no Holy Reconciling.

A recent realization is that reconciling doesn’t mean ipso facto you get what you want. Happy ever after. It just means something is resolved, reconciled, unblocked. The denying force is just as important and blessed as the affirming force, allowing the reconciling force to enter.

Eating Emotions

My emotions, if I look at them as Holy Denying, are important for me to have. As long as they don’t eat me up. What I am beginning to get a taste of, is that when they arise and I REMEMBER to direct them into one of my limbs while I sense it, something happens. A blending of the energy of sensation with the energy of emotion.

Like in Gurdjieff’s “I Am” exercise where the finer elements of the air can be digested, I find the blended emotional energy absorbed, leaving a sense of “something left behind.” A something that is feeding a higher part of myself.