What is Worry? “Every time you say ‘I am so worried,’ you give energy to it. You should not speak your worry.” Maurice Nicoll, Informal Work Talks and Teachings 1940-1950, p132.

“QUESTION: What is worry? Does the Work say anything about worrying? How can it be stopped?
ANSWER: Worry is a form of identifying. Literally, the word has the meaning of tearing and twisting, or choking and strangling; it was originally connected with the word ‘wring’, which is still used in the expression ‘wringing one’s hands’, one of the outward signs of worry. You will remember that every psychological or inner state finds some outer representation via the moving centre—that is, it is represented in some particular muscular movements or contractions, etc. You may have noticed that a state of worry is often reflected by a contracted wrinkling of the forehead or a twisting of the hands. States of joy never have this representation. Negative states, states of worry, or fear, or anxiety, or depression, represent themselves in the muscles by contraction, flexion, being bowed down, etc. (and often, also, by weakness in the muscles), whereas opposite emotional states are reflected into the moving centre as expansion, as standing upright, as extension of the limbs, relaxing of tension, and usually by a feeling of strength. To stop worry, people who worry and thereby frown too much or pucker up and corrugate their foreheads, clench their fists, almost cease breathing, etc., should begin here—by relaxing the muscles expressing the emotional state, and freeing the breath.” Maurice Nicoll, Psychological Commentaries, p136.

Worry as Wrong Work of Centers

“Worrying is the wrong work of centres. It is always useless. It is a form of inner considering—i.e. of identifying. It is a continual mixing up of negative imagination with a few facts and so makes only wrong connections in centres. It is a sort of lying, among the many other kinds of lying that go on in us and mess up the centres. It is always easy to worry, as it gives a relief and is, as it were, a form of justifying oneself. It is close to self-pity and violence. Worrying is not thinking. The mind is driven by the worry, by the emotional state, and is obscured. Attention to anything always helps, for directed attention puts us into more conscious parts of centres.” Maurice Nicoll, Psychological Commentaries, p137.

The Ego’s Temporal Displacement

“I have one teacher who once told me, the chief feature of the ego is that it’s never here. You’re either back worrying about what’s gone or fretting or beating up on yourself, or you’re borrowing trouble from the future. That’s the way we do. We have to learn to bring ourself back. Now, that doesn’t mean that you can’t plan. But what it means is that when it’s time to plan, you plan. You sit there, you become present in yourself, and you put yourself on planning. And when it’s done, you leave it. If you decide to do a life review, you do it. But you do it from the point of view of presence. So you start whatever you do by taking the position, by centering yourself in the now, and then intentionally doing what you’re doing. So that’s what being here in the now has to do with.” Cynthia Bourgeault, Awakened Mind Awakened Heart, 6:06 Disc 2 Track 2.

The Futility of Worry

“Look at the crows, they neither sow nor reap. They have no storehouses and no barns, yet God feeds them. How much more important are you than birds? Which of you, for all his worrying, can make himself a little taller? And if you are not able to control such a small thing, why do you worry about the rest? What is it about worry? I remember Rafe once talking to me when I was worrying about this, that, and the other. He says, how many times has something that you’ve worried about actually come true? And that interested me enough, so I started checking out. And it’s a very low ratio. So that worry is really a kind of egoic activity, by and large, that saps our strength for being present. And in that sense, it’s one of the major leeches on our psychic energy. So this whole thing about, well, why spend so much time worrying, worrying, worrying? Let go. If you have to solve a problem that’s on your plate, solve it.” Cynthia Bourgeault, Divine Exchange, disc3 track3.

“And Jesus answered and said to her, ‘Martha, Martha, you are worried and troubled about many things. But one thing is needed, and Mary has chosen that good part, which will not be taken away from her.’” Luke 10:41-42.

Worry as Energy Leak

“The traditions often say the major leeches on your energy field that pull you back into that lower gravitational orbit, like and dislike, which is another word for judgment, gossip, chatter, worry. These are just holes in your roof. And it’s why virtually all spiritual traditions ask you, if you’re serious about transforming, take those little fish and throw them out of your life.” Cynthia Bourgeault, Divine Exchange, 3:33 disc3 track5.

“People who worry a great deal exhaust themselves, drain themselves of force. If you will notice yourself when you are worrying, you will see that it really is like tearing and twisting and strangling oneself inside, corresponding with the outer muscular movements which have already been described. There is no centre of gravity. There is no direction, no clear aim; everything is in disorder; everything is, as it were, running about in oneself in every direction. It is as if all the different ‘I’s in oneself got up and rushed about wringing their hands and saying anything that the negative imagination, which dominates the scene, suggests to them.” Maurice Nicoll, Psychological Commentaries, p138.

The Worrying ‘I’s

“Some time ago we spoke of worry and worrying ‘I’s. These form a strong group of ‘I’s in most people. Their action is very interesting to observe. Their sole object is to upset you and make you depressed or, in short, worried. They lead to nothing else. They are quite useless, as are so many ‘I’s in us. But you have to notice for yourself, by direct and sustained self-observation, what they do and say and what their main object is. Worrying ‘I’s act in two main ways. You all have your worrying ‘I’s—about one another, about business, about money, about your state of health, and so on. And you also have to meet other people’s worrying ‘I’s. Try to see even one worrying ‘I’ distinctly in yourself, study it, see how it only loves to exhaust you and leads nowhere. Then you will see others. Also notice how some of your worrying ‘I’s connect themselves with the Work. You begin to worry about the Work in one way or another, whether you are working, and so on. They are like flies, and can settle on anything.” Maurice Nicoll, Psychological Commentaries, p314.

The One Care

“Kabir Helminski has a wonderful line in Living Presence that says, if you can make all cares into one care, the care for simply being present, you will be cared for by that presence, which is the fountain of creative love. ‘Martha, Martha, you worry about so many things, only one thing is necessary’. So if you can draw your attention in and place it in being fully present to what’s happening before you, since every now is a slice of divine being, that means all divine possibility is in it.” Cynthia Bourgeault, Kanuga 2015, 19:26 Day 4.2c Morning Teaching Part 3 of 3.

Working with Worry

“Life, worrying is one of the things that show us something about ourselves if we notice it uncritically and over a long enough period. But you must not think that the opposite of worrying is indifference. You can and should feel ‘anxiety’ about another person in danger—a mixture of hope and fear—but worrying is quite different, for then the imagination comes in. It becomes a habit, just as do so many other negative states, and people even imagine they are better than others by having them and feel merit in worrying. People even think it is right to worry about everything, about the past and the future, about themselves, about others, and so on. This is simply nothing but a serious negative illness, difficult to cure, for once a person has become nothing but an inverted machine for worrying, all sorts of wrong connections have been established and everything works in the wrong way, and since the only thing he enjoys is worrying, to deprive him of this, were it possible, would be to destroy his chief interest.” Maurice Nicoll, Psychological Commentaries, p137.

“A little conscious work at that time, noticing the small beginnings of worrying or negative thoughts or self-pity, etc., etc. and saying no to them—lifting oneself out of them—not taking them as you—all this work on non-identifying with certain machines, certain ‘I’s, in the early morning, can alter the whole day. And to this, of course, belongs the idea of cancelling debts, letting go all inner accounts—if possible.” Maurice Nicoll, Psychological Commentaries, p138.

Freedom from Worry

“It’s better just to see, just to see. As you see consciously, you’ll see more. The reward always for seeing is more seeing. So you needn’t worry too much, see what you can. Allow the situations of life, particularly the ones that typically push your buttons, to let you see places where you get hooked. And think about what the patterns are.” Cynthia Bourgeault, Conscious Love, 5:04 disc1 track11.

“Sometimes we attain states in which the False Personality is entirely shut out and we have a kind of illumination and happiness that is entirely unknown to us in the ordinary states of Consciousness in which we pass most of our existence. All sense of worry disappears as well as all the usual feelings of ‘I’. All forms of jealousy, all forms of internal considering vanish. One is alone with oneself and tastes a new kind of Consciousness which is little short of a state of bliss.” Maurice Nicoll, Psychological Commentaries, p922.

Beyond Surface Anxieties

“The traditionalist movement and all the binary metaphysics that fall in that camp make them, in my estimation, unable to adapt, to be resilient in the ever-changing times that we’re in. And this is exactly the knot in which we’re impaled. And so in a way what you need to do is take away the surface and move beyond the worry about modernity, the worry about, we’ve lost the plot, and begin to see where are the roots of resilience, where are the sources of hope in a teaching stream, in a metaphysical stream that allows us to move forward and bring something into the equation.” Cynthia Bourgeault, Claymont Oct 2019 Gurdjieff-Teilhard, 1:20:00 03 – TUES AM Teaching.

“And as we are able to spot and release identification, the patches of objective knowing, our ability to be in sympathetic vibration with it, get larger and more extended. But it almost seems to me that a good way to begin this as process, rather than trying to worry about attaining permanent, immutable, objective knowing, which is a fine egoic goal if ever there was one, is simply to begin to learn the difference in taste in yourself by watching. Between your usual subjective ways of thinking and being and responding, and times when you know that you’re moving out of a different space.” Cynthia Bourgeault, Living Presence, 22:40 Chapter-8-Meditation.

“If you can gain the critical threshold in this life, the depth of this physical body provides no deterrent whatsoever to continued growth to our full level of sacred individuality, as Gurdjieff used to call it, with language that’s not understood today. But we do keep growing. There is growth beyond the grave. So worry not, but sleep not either.” Cynthia Bourgeault, Building 2nd Body June 2022, 13:17 3-transub-spiritual-substances.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​

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Logion 36
Yeshua says…
Do not spend your time from one day to the next
worrying about your outer appearance;
what you wear,
and what you look like.

Logion 63
Yeshua says…
There was a rich man
who had expendable wealth.
He said to himself,
“I will take my money
and use it to plant, sow and harvest,
filling my barns with the produce,
then I’ll have everything.”
These were the thoughts occupying his mind
the night he died.
Listen, if you are paying attention!

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Page numbers for Maurice Nicoll refer to Psychological Commentaries on the Teachings of Gurdjieff and Ouspensky (Eureka Editions:2020) unless stated otherwise. 

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.