Making the Work Your Own

Gurdjieff said, “Make the work your own.” But he didn’t say how to do that. I think I just got a clue what this means from an experience at a recent work event at Claymont.

I’ve practiced the morning exercises given by Mr. Bennett for many years. Over that time I’ve come to appreciate that each person has their own way of assimilating an exercise and transmitting it. In order to relay the energetic of an exercise, one must be actively inside of it. There are nuances within each person’s presentation that are unique. Even more so when the original source is different. For instance, an exercise I learned from Mr. Bennett may have been practiced differently by Mr. and Mrs. Adie, who also worked directly with Gurdjieff. Yet it is the same work. This past weekend I found the relaying of an exercise, transmitted through a student of Joseph Azize, who worked with the Adies, offered a new facet to my own work.

The Work

I’m used to working with certain Bennett exercises that use a “thread” which one sends out to “connect” with something and then pulls back in. In Azize’s book, he writes about Gurdjieff using the term “to suck-in” as an act of pulling into oneself. I was not used to that term since Mr. Bennett did not use it.

During the work event we just had at Claymont, the leader of the morning exercise (a student of Azize’s) had us “suck-in” our atmosphere. As we were brought to that directive, I could feel my atmosphere being sucked in. It was a nuanced and new experience. On a previous morning, we had worked with a version of the “I Am” exercise that was also new to me. Breathing in “I” with the “whole of myself,” we then exhaled “Am” sensing our spine. I had not worked before with sensing my spine while exhaling “Am.”

Making the Work My Own

Here’s where I felt something became my “own” like pieces of a jigsaw puzzle suddenly falling into place. 

The combination of the whole of my gathered (sucked-in) presence with the sensation of “Am” in my spine, was the answer as to how Mrs. Popoff had carried her presence in the small of her back. During my time with her, I became aware of that presence emanating from her and wondered about it. In seeing photos and films of Gurdjieff I thought I could see where she had “gotten” it from.

But I had never been able to emulate it and no one had ever taught this to me. Now I understood something about how to work at accumulating that presence. The pieces of the puzzle fell into place when I experienced sucking in my presence. I could work at making this “my own” because it came from my own lived experience of morning exercises and my knowledge from seeing Mrs. Popoff emulate it. With the experience of sucking in my presence and depositing it via sensation into my lumbar spine, I was able to carry a presence in the small of my back during most of that day of work.