The Gurdjieff Movements

These exercises open a prospect that is very simple and very accessible. Anyone can approach them, whatever his capacities; and from that point of view, one can say they answer to a lack in today’s world, a need for renewal. These exercises are one of the disciplines one finds today—there are still too few—which point out the necessity of associating the body with an inner, spiritual aspiration. This necessity has been forgotten; the body lives apart, and we don’t feel the inadequacy in that situation, and the limitations which it imposes on every plane of our existence. We are given no taste of the body’s dormant possibilities; we don’t know how to listen to it nor to call it.

But a relation could be established—and not only during the practice of a discipline. Those who participate in the work of the movements will tell you that the understanding which has come to them carries over into other moments, in the most ordinary situations. There is no circumstance in our life which need be cut off from it, not even taking the subway or sitting at one’s desk or walking in the street. So you see, we come back down to the level where we live.

Pauline de Dampierre