“We don’t distinguish clearly enough in our parlance today between sensing, emotion and feeling.” Cynthia Bourgeault
“We have to get a little bit clearer about the difference between emotion and feeling, and what feeling really is, and how feeling is related to sensing.” Cynthia, Claymont 2016 Three-Centered Knowing, 40:12 08-Wednesday Morning Teaching.
“A lot of what people call feeling is really emotion, and they are completely different orders of reality. Gurdjieff used to say, feeling, real feeling is something miraculous, something large that most people have no idea what real feeling is. Emotions are energy signatures that crystallize and constellate around your perspective or your point of view. And in that sense, they are trapped or limited. When you have them around you, they’re swirling around your smaller self-identity. And they tend to reinforce that. There’s often a lot of negativity involved in emotions.
“Things go badly at least as frequently as they go well. And as you live in that kind of fixed, trapped, small, finite pond of your emotional life, a lot of negativity gets generated. Particularly if you’re of a personality type that hangs on to resentments or is prone to envy or to malign. And that kind of stuff, as it were, co-ops the emotional center, as Gurdjieff used to explain it, and really tends to put it in the service of negativity. And it’s only when you’re beyond that, that life begins to happen. So, you can get there in a program that essentially allows you to dis-identify with negative emotions, which means step back from them, not immediately claim them as the truth of your life.
“Step back from them, let them be. If you can run that kind of an approach combined with patient work sensing the heart, collecting your attention in the heart, what begins to happen over the course of time through that combined action of the dis-identifying with the negativity and also the positivity, the negativity that drags us back to that smaller self where it’s the world of emotions. If you do that practice combined with a quiet and patient sensing of the region of the heart, gradually the heart becomes clarified. Purified in the old language. Clarified so that it can begin to be a worthy vessel of feeling. And the big characteristic of feeling is first of all that it’s not identified. Cynthia Bourgeault, Claymont 2016 Three-Centered Knowing, 2:00-8:00 12-Wednesday Evening Reflection.
“Emotion is self-referential. It has to do with everything in terms of me, and it’s almost always bound up in a story of me. So that it’s already in bed with the intellectual center. Feeling is more transpersonal and sensation-based. There’s a very strong formula, particularly in the movements, which makes them so engaging for people, that the color palettes of the music, the modality, the vibrations, the intervals, are carefully chosen. Again, on the basis of sensation. When that meets with the work, it releases a strong component of feeling. Which is sensation-based at least 50% and has nothing to do with one’s personal story. It has to do with the universal poignancy and pathos and joy of the human condition. So those are the proper senses of that.” Cynthia Bourgeault, Holding Our Planet 2024, 18:00 04 Sunday pm Teaching.
“We don’t distinguish clearly enough in our parlance today between sensing, feeling, and emotion. We use them all indiscriminately and more or less as synonyms. And they’re very, very different. Sensing is actually a physical activity that the moving center undertakes that resonates in your body and being. It gives you information that way. Emotion is feelingness, which is basically just configured patterns of vibrational energy. Feelingness stuck to a fixed reference point, i.e., my stake in the matter. And the great inner traditions say that as you begin to purge your stake in the matter, your identification, you don’t go emotionally brain dead. But rather, genuine feeling begins to arrive, which is always transpersonal and is always slightly heavier than the human being can bear by themselves, always multivalent. Joy and sorrow are there. You touch it beautifully at two points in your journey, in free fall and in remorse. Real remorse, not guilt. You feel the impact of your finitude, not as your ego having failed, but just the sense that you are the veil that hides the paradise you seek. And this deep remorse for harms done, for inner injuries. At those moments, you begin to touch real feelingness. Blessed are they that mourn, for they shall be comforted. So, when emotion gets unstuck from my personal stake, and can generally be allowed to flee, it comes back as deep feelingness.” Cynthia Bourgeault, Kanuga Nov 2015, 9:00-11:30 Day 4.2b Morning Teaching Part 2 of 3.
“In the Gurdjieff work, every emotion that’s held captive to our ego self is negative emotion. Negative emotion is not just anger, rage, ire. Anything that’s held captive to a smaller self, any bound emotion is negative emotion. Because what makes an emotion positive is its freedom.” Cynthia Bourgeault, Rebuilding Trust Feb 2022, 46:27 Day3.2-Crucible-Welcome-Practice.
“If you can somehow free up the energy that’s bound up in personal reactivity in service of maintaining the story of your nuclear self, there’s an almost whoosh of liberation into a new possibility. [In the Welcoming Practice] instead of just getting reactive and angry and caught in the drama, you go through this three-part step process. First of all, you focus on the disturbance as physical sensation in your body. So you immediately move it into the realm of sensation, engage the full participation of moving center awareness. instead of saying let me talk about my fear, you become present to fear as sensation in your body. Where does it live? What’s it doing to you? Is your jaw tense? You don’t try to relax it, you just observe, how is fear manifesting in me as sensation? Immediately grounds it in sensation. Then the next step in it is to welcome this afflictive emotion, at the senses level.” Cynthia Bourgeault, Imaginal WS 8-2020, 24:15 0819 IWS Wednesday PM Teaching.
“You’ll never find real feeling that is devoid of a deep component of sensation. The well-trained moving center in touch with sensation at a subtle level is the gateway to your inner body, your second body.” Cynthia Bourgeault, Holding Our Planet 2024, 26:00 04 Sunday pm Teaching.
Logion 58
Yeshua says...
Blessed are the troubled.
They have seized hold of life.
Quotations from the Gospel of Thomas are from Lynn C Bauman, Ward J Bauman, Cynthia Bourgeault, The Luminous Gospels (Praxis 2008)
Read the Impression introducing the Gospel of Thomas.
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