So many times I have experienced the excitement and/or the anxiety cropping from various events occuring in our life! Almost 99% of the times we react/respond to the emotion! By acting in response to the emotion we feel liberated from the pressure that the emotion exerts on us! I cannot imagine a time when I am asked not to act but to contain!
However, I learnt the art of containment very recently and found my self progressing to a different level of being! The art of containment calls for sitting with the emotion for some time. The essence of the concept as I understand is, "even a negative emotion has a postive side to it". The art is to absorb the positive part of the emotion and work with it to progress!
Many of us may think what is the concept all about w.r.t. practice/application. For the sake of better explanation let me take an example from our everyday lives. Each one of us at some point or the other would have experienced an emotion triggered from a disagreement with ones we adore or look up to. Just to make the situation a bit more intense, let me say many os us may have experienced an emotion when we are let down by our loved ones! How do you feel at that point? Aggravated, agressive, charged with an emotion which is not so pleasant! At the risk of generalizing, I would like to assume that something unpleasant has a "negative" connotation to it! Now, the art of containment requires us to do the following:
1) be true to our emotion,
2) contain the emotion and not act!
Now, if we act in the above scenario we have closed the loop, or the first cycle of the process! However, the art of containing requires us to open a sacred space for the emotion! The idea in nutshell is to seek "non action at the first gut". Sit with emotions, value the emotions, draw the positive notes of the emotion and harness the strength of those emotions to work for your benefit!
Remember, the cardinal rule- " Energy can neither be created nor be destroyed". It can be transformed from "one form to another"! The same holds good here! If we act, say if one screams then what is merely happening here is the "latent" energy is getting converted to "sound" energy. However, think of an opportunity where this "latent" energy can be converted to "talent". No! It is not as easy as swapping the letter "l" & "t". practising it calls for containment, perseverance and "tapa" (sanskrit word meaning meditation)! Yes it means sitting with the unresolved parts and uncertainities and just being with them!
The art of containment is one of the ways of practicing Negative capability(NC). NC is a theory of the poet John Ketas describing the capacity for accepting uncertainty and the unresolved. Keats believed that great people (especially poets) have the ability to accept that not everything can be resolved. Keats, as a Romantic, believed that the truths found in the imagination access holy authority. Such authority cannot otherwise be understood, and thus he writes of "uncertainties." This "being in uncertaint[y]" is a place between the mundane, ready reality and the multiple potentials of a more fully understood existence. [- Excerpts about NC from Wikipedia]
This concept is applicable not just in personal lives but in corporations. The leaders are dealing with uncertainities day in and day out! The ability to contain and to be comfortable with the "unresolved" is important for every leadership style! Leaders need to be comfortable in the place of "Reflectibve Inaction"!
As I experience more of NC more will follow....thanks for your attention.....
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