Circumventing Negative Emotions

 You can, and indeed, must, find and invent for yourself ways of circumventing negative emotions. To find something that requires directed attention is one way, if you can bring yourself to do it. Another is to remember and recall and go back in time to similar previous occasions—provided you have got a Work-memory based on genuine self-observation and not merely the usual illusory lying memory.

Watching the state is always useful—if you can without joining it. Another way is to see what made you negative—if you can. Efforts of this kind make you more conscious and that always helps because it puts you in better parts of centers, in less slummy places in the inner city of yourself. One has to feel that one is wrong if one is negative— really feel it—not because you were told but because you see it for yourself. Without this feeling all you do will be useless and meretricious and artificial. The true Way Out is Self-Remembering.

Maurice Nicoll, "The Prison of Negative Emotions” in Psychological Commentaries on the Teaching of Gurdjieff and Ouspensky (Vol. 5, p. 1711)