Dear readers and friends,
This week’s post is a jubilant announcement that my Memoir is out! Real People: At the Pinnacle with Irmis Popoff and the Second Basic Course with J.G. Bennett, A Memoir, is now available on Amazon. https://www.amazon.com/Real-People-Pinnacle-Sherborne-Bennett/dp/1954744706
Real People Synopsis
In today’s world of political and climate instability, Real People tells the story of a unique school. Designed to prepare students for the future, this program teaches students to become “real human beings.”
John G. Bennett spent fifty years studying the spiritual teachings of George Ivanovich Gurdjieff and others. At seventy, he followed an inner directive to “start a school” based on his insights. Thus the International Academy for Continuous Education was born in a run-down historic English manor, named Sherborne House. Few students have chronicled their esoteric experience on Bennett’s ten-month Basic Course in the bucolic Cotswolds area of England. Roberta J. Chromey has done this through telling the story of her young self, Bobby Jo.
Real People follows Bobby Jo from her college days in New Jersey to her first teacher in the Gurdjieff Work. Then on to J. G. Bennett’s school in England in the early 1970s. In the ancient halls and dorms, paneled dining room, Great Hall, basement kitchen, and Horse Parlor of Sherborne House, magical events happen. Bennett gives talks and Themes that inspire surprising outcomes. Such as an examination of one’s relationship to material objects culminating in empathy with a potato and dancing with a mop.
At Sherborne House, the course is its own journey—from learning to cook and clean for one hundred fellow travelers, experiencing the discipline and mystery of Gurdjieff’s dances, to finding communion with a pony. Meditative exercises and practices of silence and awareness open doors to external and internal realms. Senior staff are fully drawn characters. Visiting teachers play major roles at crucial junctures, fellow students provide background. The course comes alive in a living crucible that melts young Bobby Jo and forms in her a new understanding.
I ordered it last night and am excited to start reading as soon as it arrives.
Congratulations! I look forward to reading your book.
Wow, congratulations!
Congratulations. I just ordered it.
Congratulations Roberta! I just ordered a copy. I am grateful for the Realness that you share in your blog posts and now in your memoir. Looking forward to reading it. PS: love the cover.
Thank you all for your patience and support in the fruition of this project. With love-
PS Jack designed the Enneagram collage.
the cover…there sit Pierre and Manfred. Manfred drove me to Mrs, Popoff’s home on Long Island to work with her for several days during the Claymont first course.. We talked about cats and olives and laughed.
Congratulations Roberta! I look forward to reading it.
Congratulations Roberta!
Fantastic! It’s a terrific book, with a cover to match. Can’t wait to receive my copy.
Looking forward to its arrival in my mailbox! Congratulations Roberta!!!
HI Nick, I hope you’ll leave a review on Amazon after you read it!
Dear Roberta,
I have just finished reading the Kindle version of your book ‘Real People’ and just wanted to send a note of thanks to you for having written it. I thought it offered a unique perspective on how group studies actually ‘land’ in us. I found much of the information personally helpful, particularly JGB’s remark to Jack that one should fully inhabit / believe in the ‘yes’ of the Decision Exercise. This opened up a new perspective in my own work with the Decision Exercise, and for that I am grateful.
I have no doubt that others will find your book valuable as well.
Thank you, John, for sharing this. I hope your comments will also help others in their work.
Candid, earnest, stimulating. Self-revealing from the author and for the reader. One does not have to know this discipline to begin to sense the experiences shared by the stories of this memoir.