Introduction – Beyond Reaction

Welcome back to Martfotai, a quiet path to wholeness, inner freedom, and becoming.

In Episode 1, we saw how the self we think is singular is, in fact, fragmented into many shifting “I”s. Episode 2 then revealed how the outer world continuously mirrors these inner fragments, helping us recognize and integrate them. Today, in Episode 3, we move from observing fragmentation toward actively cultivating unity and steadiness within ourselves.

In a reactive world, stability is rarely found by controlling external events or other people. Instead, true steadiness arises by consciously cultivating a unified centre within. It’s about shifting from living automatically, caught in a loop of habitual reactions, to intentionally choosing how you respond moment by moment.

Consider the difference clearly: a reaction is automatic, unconscious, and mechanical. You get cut off in traffic, and irritation surges instantly. Someone criticizes you, and defensiveness jumps up automatically. You wait in a long queue, and impatience simmers without your permission. Each of these reactions perpetuates inner fragmentation because each reaction is isolated, mechanical, and disconnected from your true presence.

But here’s the essential insight we begin with today:

You are not your reactions. You are the conscious space in which reactions occur.

Today’s episode introduces a precise and practical method to gently unify these fragmented reactions. You’ll learn how consciously adjusting your physical posture and intentionally guiding your thoughts can directly influence your emotional reactions. Rather than being ruled by your emotions, you’ll learn to gently guide and stabilize them through conscious, intentional effort.

As we proceed, we’ll briefly explore George I. Gurdjieff’s model of our inner world: six distinct centers within us. Three are essence centres, instinctive, emotional, and higher emotional, centres we were born with, naturally given and operating automatically. The other three are acquired or personality centres, the moving centre (body), the intellectual centre (mind), and the higher mental centre. These personality centres are learned and developed throughout our lives. And because they are learned, they can also be consciously controlled. Our two higher centres are already fully formed, but usually, in our generally fragmented states, we have little to no access to them.

We cannot easily command our instincts or emotions directly because they operate automatically. No one teaches us how to feel, how to be hot or cold, happy or bored. But we have learned, and therefore can consciously control, how we move our bodies, how we speak, and how we direct our thoughts.

This practical understanding is our direct entry point into inner stability. By consciously adjusting our face, posture, and thoughts, we can gently but effectively guide our emotional centre into alignment and calmness. This isn’t about suppressing or fighting our emotions; it’s about providing clear, gentle, sustained guidance.

As we explore further, we’ll briefly touch on the rich metaphor of Kumki, trained elephants in India that gently guide, sustain, and aid wild elephants, illustrating beautifully how our consciously controllable centres can gently influence our wild, reactive emotional centre.

We start by remembering that becoming unified isn’t about immediate perfection. It’s about consistent, patient practice, consciously choosing moment by moment to cultivate the steadiness that already quietly awaits within you.

Let’s begin.

Section 2 – Acquired Personality Centres vs. Given Essence Centres

Before we explore practical steps for achieving a stable inner presence, it’s essential to clearly understand the inner structure of our being as outlined in G.I. Gurdjieff’s Fourth Way teachings.

Within us are six distinct centres, each with unique functions and characteristics. Three of these are called essence centres, naturally given to us at birth, functioning automatically and often subconsciously:

• Instinctive Centre: Responsible for automatic bodily functions, breathing, digestion, circulation, and physical sensations like hunger, thirst, heat, or cold. No one taught you these sensations, they arise spontaneously and naturally.
• Emotional Centre: The seat of our feelings, moods, and emotional reactions. Joy, sadness, anger, or fear arise naturally, without instruction or lessons. Notice how we even use the same word, “feel”, for both instinctive sensations and emotional experiences, emphasizing how fundamentally automatic these centres are.
• Higher Emotional Centre: Already fully formed, this centre connects us to conscience, and experiences of compassion, empathy, and unity consciousness. However, it remains mostly inaccessible until we’ve unified and stabilized our lower centres. We’ll explore this higher centre more deeply in dedicated future episodes and special Martfotai sessions, providing precise exercises to verify and experience its qualities directly.

The other three centres within us are known as acquired or personality centres, developed throughout life through imitation, learning, and intentional practice. Because they’re acquired, they can be consciously controlled:

• Moving Centre: Governs physical movements, gestures, posture, and facial expressions. Skills such as walking, speaking, or writing are learned, practiced, and refined, giving us conscious, intentional control over this centre.
• Intellectual Centre: The centre of thought, reasoning, inner narrative, verbal communication, and language. No child is born speaking or thinking logically; these skills are actively learned. Hence, we can consciously shape, direct, or pause our thoughts.
• Higher Mental Centre: Like the higher emotional centre, this centre is fully formed and provides objective reasoning, deep insight, and profound awareness. Again, it remains mostly inaccessible until we’ve stabilized and unified our lower centres, and especially until our intellectual centre steps down and stops trying to take charge of our lives. We’ll also explore this centre thoroughly in later episodes and dedicated Martfotai sessions, offering clear, practical methods for verification and exploration.

No one teaches you how to feel emotions, but you actively learn how to move your body, speak, and think. These learned skills, your acquired centres, are your direct points of conscious influence.

Consider our inner self as a “house”: Normally, we live in the lower levels, our instinctive, emotional, moving, and intellectual centres. The more we identify with these lower centres, the lower our level of consciousness. For example, someone you may have heard described as “Reptilian,” isn’t literally reptile-like but is heavily identified with base instincts, lust, greed, aggression, reflecting strong identification with the instinctive centre.

Gurdjieff identified three common ways people habitually gravitate toward one lower centre, forming distinct personality types:

• Type 1 (Instinctive/Moving): Primarily identified with physicality, sensations, and actions.
• Type 2 (Emotional): Primarily identified with feelings and moods, often sensitive and emotionally driven.
• Type 3 (Intellectual): Primarily identified with the mind, thoughts, analytical thinking, and intellectual processes.

These personality types illustrate habitual tendencies to gravitate toward certain centres, limiting our full potential. By consciously balancing these lower centres, starting with the moving and intellectual, we lay a strong foundation for accessing the already-present higher emotional and higher mental centres.

Next, we’ll illustrate a practical method to consciously manage your moving and intellectual centres, gently guiding your emotional centre toward stability and unified inner presence.

Section 3 – The Sacred Pause – Deepened

In Episode 1, we introduced the Sacred Pause as a simple yet powerful way to interrupt mechanical, unconscious reactions. Today, we’ll deepen this practice significantly, clearly demonstrating how it can become a powerful method for unifying and stabilizing your inner self.

The emotional centre, naturally given to us, is challenging to influence directly because it does not readily respond to verbal instructions. You cannot simply say, “Relax,” “Stay calm,” or “Be happy,” and expect your emotional centre to follow your command. The emotional centre does not speak the language of words, it speaks the language of feelings, imagery, and direct emotional impressions.

However, we do have direct conscious influence over two of our acquired centres: the moving centre (our body and gestures) and the intellectual centre (our mind and thoughts). Because these centres are intentionally learned, they can be intentionally controlled and gently guided.

In its deeper form, the essence of the Sacred Pause is consciously and deliberately using these two acquired centres to gently stabilize, guide, and harmonize your emotional centre.

Here’s how you can practically apply and refine this deeper Sacred Pause in your everyday life:

Step 1: Physical Anchoring (Moving Centre)
At the very first sign of emotional agitation, be it irritation, anxiety, impatience, or frustration, begin by consciously engaging your moving centre in subtle ways:

• Soften your face.
  Notice clearly how quickly your face tightens when agitated. Gently soften your facial expression. Pay special attention to relaxing the muscles around your eyes, gently releasing tension from your forehead, and consciously letting go of tightness in your jaw.
• Refine your posture intentionally.
  If you’re standing, pause for a moment and feel the stable support of the ground beneath your feet. Gently lengthen your spine and soften your shoulders, consciously letting them drop naturally. If seated, ease your posture slightly back, soften your hands, and release any hidden tension in your neck or lower back.
• Slow your breathing intentionally.
  Take a slow, deep breath, gently feeling the air fill your lungs. Exhale slowly and deliberately, noticing each breath anchoring you deeper into calm physical stability.

Step 2: Mental Anchoring (Intellectual Centre)
Once you’ve consciously relaxed your body, turn gently toward your intellectual centre, shifting your attention away from habitual or negative thought patterns through these subtle refinements:

• Momentarily pause your internal dialogue.
  Imagine gently pressing a “pause button” on your thoughts. Allow yourself a brief mental space of quiet clarity, free from immediate reaction.
• Quietly name your feeling with kindness and precision.
  Without judgment, internally name the emotion you’re experiencing: “This is frustration,” “This is anxiety,” or “This is impatience.” Clearly identifying the feeling helps to create distance, gently diffusing the intensity of the emotion.
• Gently introduce a balanced thought or affirmation.
  Replace habitual negative thoughts with a clear, balanced, and compassionate inner statement such as, “This feeling is temporary,” “I can find calmness within this moment,” or simply, “I am present and stable.”

Through these intentionally managed centres, your relaxed body and your consciously adjusted mind, you establish a gentle, stable container that naturally holds and guides your emotional reactions toward calmness and clarity.

Step 3: Integrating Gentle Micro-Pauses Throughout Your Day
To deepen and solidify this practice further, integrate frequent “micro-pauses” throughout your day, short, intentional pauses lasting only one to three seconds at a time. These micro-pauses become subtle, gentle reminders to your emotional centre, continuously encouraging stability and inner calm:

• Pause intentionally before responding in conversations, briefly feeling your facial expression and posture soften before speaking.
• Gently pause during periods of waiting, such as at traffic lights, checkout lines, or before meetings, consciously releasing any subtle tension you notice in your body.
• Regularly check in with your posture and facial expression throughout the day, making gentle, incremental adjustments as necessary.

Step 4: Evening Reflection for Reinforcing Awareness
At the conclusion of each day, briefly and gently reflect on the effectiveness of your intentional pauses, reinforcing your growing inner stability and clarity:

• Identify clearly any moments when consciously relaxing your face and posture that significantly influenced your emotional calmness and clarity.
• Reflect gently on improvements you noticed in your emotional responses and overall sense of inner stability, specifically acknowledging how consciously managing your moving and intellectual centres influenced your emotional centre.

This brief, intentional evening reflection reinforces your practice, gently building stable, unified presence day by day.

Gurdjieff offered clear, practical guidance on beginning the work of self-control by consciously relaxing the face, noting specifically how quickly the face responds to inner and outer impressions.

Intentionally managing our posture (moving centre) and thoughts (intellectual centre) creates the ideal conditions for the emotional centre to become calm and stable. We cannot directly command the emotional centre with words, but by gently adjusting our body and deliberately shifting our thoughts, we compassionately and effectively guide our emotional reactions toward steadiness and inner harmony.

With consistent practice of this deepened Sacred Pause, you will gradually unify fragmented emotional reactions into stable, intentional responses, shifting clearly and naturally from automatic reactions to conscious, intentional presence, one gentle pause at a time.

Section 4 – Becoming Unified Through Acquired Centres

As we consistently practice the Sacred Pause as described earlier, we start to directly experience how consciously managing our acquired centres, the moving and intellectual centres, gently harmonizes and stabilizes our emotional centre.

To clearly understand why this approach is effective, it’s essential to realize that each of the six centres within us speaks its own unique language. Each centre has a distinct way of receiving and expressing information, and each has its own type of memory:

• The Instinctive Centre communicates in touch and sensation. It understands warmth, coldness, hunger, thirst, physical sensations we experience directly, effortlessly, and without conscious learning.
• The Emotional Centre communicates primarily through imagery. It doesn’t comprehend words directly. When we recall emotional memories, they come to us vividly as images, scenes, faces, places. To reach this centre directly, you must clearly imagine or visualize the emotional quality or feeling you wish to convey.
• The Moving Centre, however, communicates directly through gestures, posture, and facial expressions, physical movements we consciously learn, practice, and can intentionally control.
• The Intellectual Centre communicates clearly in language, words, thought patterns, and internal narrative. We actively learn how to speak, how to think logically, and how to reason, and therefore can consciously direct and adjust our thoughts at will.

The two higher centres, though fully formed within us from the start, have yet more subtle and elevated languages:

• The Higher Emotional Centre communicates through symbols. It immediately understands sacred symbols, profound metaphors, and deeply meaningful imagery without the need for explanation or reasoning. It operates beyond ordinary emotional reactions and offers a profound sense of unity, compassion, and interconnectedness.
• The Higher Mental Centre communicates through pure reason, objective insight, and direct knowing, beyond words, beyond logic, beyond ordinary thoughts. It provides immediate clarity, profound understanding, and unmediated wisdom.

Ordinarily, we spend most of our lives in the lower centres, our instinctive, emotional, moving, and intellectual centres, often caught in habitual, mechanical patterns of thinking, feeling, and behaving. We live, metaphorically, in the ghettoes of our inner world, caught in loops of negative thoughts and emotional reactivity, unaware of the brighter, clearer possibilities just beyond our habitual patterns.

Why live in the ghettoes of our minds when we can live on sunny boulevards?

Each time we consciously and intentionally use our moving and intellectual centres, we gently lead ourselves out of these habitual inner ghettoes and into the clearer, brighter spaces of unified presence. The emotional centre cannot easily be instructed through words, because it doesn’t speak the language of words. Instead, we have to clearly imagine the state we wish to feel, or, simpler still, actively adjust the physical expressions and thoughts that accompany that emotional state.

Begin with the face. Relax your facial muscles. Consciously adjust your posture, your gestures, your breathing. Then deliberately shift your thoughts. With two out of three centres clearly influenced, your emotions have little choice but to follow.

This method works because your emotional centre naturally follows the clear, stable guidance of your consciously controlled moving and intellectual centres. When your body relaxes, when your face softens, when your posture shifts toward ease and balance, your emotional centre naturally senses this calm and begins to settle. When your intellectual centre pauses automatic, negative, or anxious thought-patterns, your emotional centre recognizes this quiet clarity and aligns accordingly.

We can understand this clearly through a beautiful metaphor used traditionally in India, called “Kumki”—trained elephants that gently guide and sustain wild elephants. Kumki elephants are specially trained not to suppress the wild elephants, but to guide, calm, and stabilize them gently and compassionately, preventing harm or panic.

Your emotional centre is very much like a wild elephant: valuable, powerful, vital—but also reactive, unpredictable, and challenging to manage directly. Your consciously controlled moving and intellectual centres act precisely like gentle Kumki elephants, providing steady, compassionate aid. They do not suppress your emotions, nor do they engage in conflict with them. Instead, they clearly and gently guide your emotional centre into alignment and stability.

This approach is profoundly practical and compassionate. You’re not trying to conquer or dominate your emotional reactions. You’re offering gentle, sustained guidance by intentionally adjusting your physical posture and facial expressions (moving centre), and deliberately shifting and clarifying your thoughts (intellectual centre).

Think clearly about moments when you feel emotionally agitated—perhaps frustrated, anxious, or impatient. Instead of letting your emotions dictate your posture (tightening your shoulders or jaw) and your thoughts (negative, anxious patterns), reverse the flow consciously. Change your body first—relax your face, breathe gently, adjust your posture. Then clearly redirect your thoughts into balanced, compassionate perspectives. Even intentionally smiling can signal to your emotional centre that calmness is possible. Over time, your emotions naturally follow these intentional changes.

This intentional practice begins to unify your fragmented self, clearly bringing harmony to your inner world. Each time you consciously use your acquired centres in this way, you strengthen your inner unity. Your emotional centre—once wild and reactive—becomes gradually steadier, more aligned, more unified with your clear, intentional presence.

Remember clearly, this unity is built incrementally, gently, and compassionately—one conscious pause at a time. Like a Kumki elephant gently guiding its wild companion, your consciously managed body and mind become steady companions that compassionately guide and sustain your emotional centre.

As you consciously practice this method, you begin to spend less time in habitual mental and emotional “ghettoes,” and more time on the bright, sunny boulevards of inner clarity, unity, and intentional presence.

You become gradually unified, moving closer to experiencing the subtle yet profound language of your higher centres, where life can be experienced with greater clarity, compassion, and direct knowing.

Section 5 – Closing Reflection & Encouragement

As we conclude, let’s briefly reflect on our journey so far.

In Episode 1, we recognized our fragmented selves, a shifting collection of “I”s. In Episode 2, we saw how the outer world mirrors these inner fragments. Today, we’ve learned practical ways to unify and stabilize our emotional centre by consciously managing our moving and intellectual centres.

Through the Sacred Pause, we’ve learned to consciously relax our face, adjust our posture, and redirect our thoughts, creating ideal conditions for emotional stability. Remember the essential insight:

“No one teaches you how to feel emotions, but you actively learn how to move your body, speak, and think. These learned skills are your direct points of conscious influence.”

Every intentional pause, every relaxed posture and redirected thought, moves you closer to the profound stability already present within you. Unity isn’t something external you must gain, but something internal you rediscover and reclaim.

We briefly touched on the higher emotional and higher mental centres, fully formed but mostly inaccessible until our lower centres become unified. We’ll deeply explore these powerful higher centres in future episodes and dedicated Martfotai sessions, offering precise exercises to directly verify and experience their depth.

Stabilizing your inner life isn’t about struggle or punishment; it’s about reclaiming your most sacred resource, your attention. What you feed with your attention thrives; what you consciously withdraw from returns naturally to stillness.

You don’t need to become someone else or wait for a future self to arrive. You already have everything you need, right here, right now, to experience clarity, stability, and inner unity.

(pause briefly)

Your attention might often have been scattered, unconsciously fueling emotional reactions. But every conscious pause initiates a quiet revolution within, gently harmonizing your fragmented selves.

Real transformation doesn’t come through dramatic gestures, but through small, intentional actions so subtle they feel like silence itself:

To pause. To see clearly. To simply be.

This is the Martfotai path,
Not a religion.
Not a movement.
Just a quiet, intentional walk back to your true self.

So, begin gently today: Choose one moment to consciously pause, soften your facial muscles, and intentionally shift your posture and thoughts. Let that single moment become the thread guiding you from automatic reactivity to unified presence.

You don’t have to achieve perfection,
Simply return, gently and consistently.

Soon, Martfotai will expand into a comprehensive school of inner transformation. Subscribers will gain access to weekly small-group sessions, monthly group check-ins, guided audio practices for each podcast episode, and precise exercises exploring each centre and their combinations, including the higher emotional and mental centres.

Visit martfotai.com to register your email, it’s quick and easy. Stay informed as new offerings, classes, and events become available to deepen your path toward inner unity.

Thank you deeply for sharing this journey today. Each conscious step brings you steadily closer to your true self, calm, unified, and quietly powerful.

“Before you move on, take just one intentional breath right now, begin your practice immediately.”

I’m Gary Eggleton, and this is Martfotai, sharing this quiet path of clarity and freedom with you.

Until we meet again, be gentle, compassionate, and consistent in your practice.