Finding Personal Difficulties

Finding Personal Difficulties.

The third octave in the Work Mi… is finding personal difficulties. You have to value the Work Do… Then you apply the Work to your self Ri… Then you have to discover your individual and unique difficulties. The fourth step Fa… Remembering Your Self is beyond the reach of man asleep.

It is very difficult to talk about personal difficulties because they are unique and often cannot be expressed in words. As Krishnamuti says, the word is never the thing itself. Many difficulties are in the moving-instinctive center and have to be worked through in the moment. Other difficulties are from the emotional center and words are only approximations of the genuine emotion.

I discovered that my body was my weakest center before I ever heard of the moving-instinctive center. Growing up in Philadelphia, I did a lot of walking the streets, but I never was involved in any organized sports. My dad was an ex-boxer and had us work out with the gloves. I knew that I wasn’t good at making things and never really learned to use tools.

When my parents broke up and I moved to the country at the end of seventh grade I began to feel vary awkward and self -conscious. I was ashamed that I lived with foster parents. I still had it in the back of my mind that we were poor, and some how not as worthy as those above us.

My classmates were all into organized sports. The very first thing I was asked was, “Are you going out for baseball?”

I figured the kid meant are you going out to play at lunch. It was baseball season and at P.E. they were playing softball. The first day or two I got picked before the girls. When my classmates saw that I had never swung a bat or caught a ball, they began picking the girls first, and laughing at my clumsiness.

It got worse as I went through high school and started hanging with the non-jocks, or the other losers. Several of us would often duck out of P.E. class and smoke cigarettes and pitch pennies in the little store across the street from the school.

As I went into adult life and began earning my living, I spent the first ten years or fifteen years working and non-skilled labor jobs. I found that I could never keep up with the better workers and often had to ask for a little help. And even as my body began to develop some mechanical skills through work experience, my emotional center felt the same shame and clumsiness.

Reading Castaneda in the early seventies I began getting a lot closer to my body. I took long walks in the open rangeland behind our house. I curled my fingers, and shut off internal dialogue. But, the emotional ‘I’s remained and I still felt ashamed of my body. And, most of the time I was not conscious enough in the moving center to recognize poor posture and a sagging belly.

As I got into the Gurdjieff aspect of the Work in the mid- eighties I began to practice moments of Self Remembering. In these instances I can feel my feet upon the floor, feel my shoulders stretching out to take in a breath, feel the tightness of my stomach. The emotional center is touched at these moments and it too begins to lose the conditioned response to my picture of myself.

Another of my personal difficulties comes from the constant fear that hangs about me. I inherited much of this fear from my mother both genetically and though experience. She was very nervous. She use to say, “God forgive me, I know I’m gonna have a nervous break-down. I know I’m gonna have a nervous break down. She would cry a lot, her hands use to shake. I too was very sensitive, and I found my hands shaking so bad that I couldn’t pour water into our paint pans during a second grade art class. One of my classmates pointed out my shaking hands and I clenched my teeth and tried with all my strength to control the shaking.

During my career as and educator I found that this fear has been very prevalent. As a teacher I seemed to have a need for complete control of every student. Some how somewhere I am afraid that if I let one child slip from my control soon I’ll lose the whole class. This fear of course is unconscious, though I did begin to get glimpses of it as I applied the Work to personal difficulties.

I remember a gangster looking student in a class where I was subbing for the first time in a new year. I wrote his name on the board for talking as I was trying to give the assignment. “Is that a challenge?” he asked.

“No, it’s a warning,” I told him. And in a moment of Self Remembering I saw that it was a challenge. I realized that I was trying to prove myself in the classroom. I was attempting to gain control by the use of force. My fear lessened a little, and I took a different approach to the challenging student when I was in more conscious ‘I’s.

My fear of losing control turned to anger and led to yelling and screaming and writing referrals. As I began to observe my negative emotions, I was able to discuss them with my students often getting thorough to some that we can never gain anything by expressing anger. More and more as I applied the Work to personal difficulties, I caught myself being angry and was at times able to shut it off.

Even on my quiet walks in the country, I found fear slipping in from my emotional center. In the silence I would become aware of a holding back in my moving center and a desire to return home for a hot cup of coffee. Then, my thinking center would flash forward to Monday and the students, and the lame lessons that were a part of No Child Left Behind. Or a thought would flash through my head of the problem that one of my grand children is facing. Or, I would imagine a carload of gang bangers waiting around the bend of the dirt road.

At times as I continued to work on finding personal difficulties, I was conscious of the flashes of fear. At these moments the silence would return and I would touch the note of Self Remembering.

Being aware of personal difficulties in a never-ending effort. I find that as I go deeper into self-awareness, there are hidden negative ‘I’s that have to be searched out. Yard work has been very beneficial to deeper contact with my moving center. Pulling weeds, shoveling dirt, sawing firewood, and being conscious of the deep resistances to work that arise has given me a closer contact with the very muscle and bone of this center.

Working in the silence of a winter morning, I can feel the pleasant emotion of enjoyment that comes from a cloud filled sky. I can taste brightness of a warming sun as it escapes the cloud cover for a few long minutes. I can feel the release that comes as fear quietly dies away.