It all started with The Master Game, by Robert de Ropp, who threw out the first crumbs about the Work that kids in the 1960s picked up on. De Ropp was associated with Timothy Leary and other UC Berkeley professors who were beginning to experiment with mind-altering psychedelic drugs. The scene in my book, Real … Read more
I always thought language was about words. On a recent seminar in West Virginia, hosted by the Society for Continuous Education at Claymont Court, I learned otherwise. Elan Sicroff, a trained classical pianist, has a long and deep experience with Gurdjieff’s Movements and Thomas de Hartman’s music. Through his search for inner meaning, he brings … Read more
What has Being Ready come to mean for me? Well, it started with the Gurdjieff Movements but hasn’t ended there. In the beginning, there was the injunction in movements class not to fidget. To resist the urge to straighten clothing or scratch one’s nose between dances. The idea was to use that time to relax … Read more
Holding Space, a month-long course I am just now completing, suddenly became real for me the other night. An unexpected text from my cousin conveyed that his sister had lost her battle with cancer and was facing imminent death. I’d felt close to my cousins but rarely saw them as they lived on the west … Read more
I just had what I’ll describe as a core experience. Meaning that it didn’t result from words, from thinking. It wasn’t like working out a problem and arriving at an “understanding.” Yet that elusive “core experience” allowed me to arrive at an understanding. So how did a core experience that led to understanding happen for … Read more
What is the Truth of My Life? This comes at the end of a prayer that I composed. The prayer became part of my practice before sitting down to work on my memoir, Real People. Now I say it before I sit down to write this blog each week. There is something that happens with … Read more
What do I bring to the edifice of the Work? I hadn’t thought of it like this when I committed to helping with Claymont’s upcoming Three-Month Course of Study. But this is the image Madam de Salzmann offers in The Reality of Being when she talks about group work. “I am responsible for the stone … Read more
The practice of blending is an important aspect of the Gurdjieff work. It has taken me a long time to appreciate its value. Initially, blending was an instruction that I understood conceptually, but not in practice. For instance, I understood the directive to blend emotional feeling into the sensation of an arm or leg. But … Read more
I Teach How to Cook, Not What to Cook, by Ben Bennett I am very grateful to Ben Bennett, for writing a thorough and balanced overview of his father’s long search for transformation. Beginning with J.G. Bennett’s extraordinary out of body experience during World War I, Ben tells a complete tale of his father’s spiritual … Read more
I keep bumping up against how I’d like to be and how I am. Recently, I wrote about my experience of “passing through” into a moment of connection, and about a dream showing me how my attitude creates my world. Alongside these wonderful insights of how I could be, I’m aware of how the smallest … Read more