Irmis B. Popoff (whom we called Mrs. Popoff and post Sherborne, Mrs. P) introduced Jack and me to Gurdjieff. There was very little known or written about Gurdjieff’s work in the early 1970s outside of P.D. Ouspensky’s In Search of the Miraculous and Gurdjieff’s All and Everything, Beelzebub’s Tales to His Grandson. Finding someone who had known and studied with Ouspensky and later Gurdjieff, was fortuitous. Yet she was willing to include us hippies in a group of middle-aged housewives and their husbands. She might also have been providing an “opportunity” for her established group members to “work on themselves.”
The thing about Mrs. Popoff, was that she carried a kind of force. Meeting her casually, you wouldn’t necessarily pick up on that. She was elderly, had a lisp from a cleft palate, olive skin, and an old-world demeanor. This was conveyed by her pinned-up white hair, long skirts hanging from under her bosom, and her habit of putting on many rings when dressing up.
However, once established as a student, one had best watch one’s P’s and Q’s! She was quick to round on anyone who was not paying “attention” in the Gurdjieffian sense of that word. She was present and when in her presence, we were too, or at least trying to be.
Our weekly meetings consisted of studying Gurdjieff’s cosmology utilizing Ouspensky’s diagrams and schemata. And of learning the “work vocabulary” which also came largely from Ouspensky. But the meat of a meeting was sharing our experiences with tasks that Mrs. Popoff gave. Tasks like brushing your teeth with your left hand, being present when walking through a doorway, listening to the sound of your voice. She gave these tasks as a way of focusing our inner work until the next meeting.
For us beginners, we soon learned that it was best to be honest with our failures to remember the task. A moment of seeing that I had just walked through a doorway “asleep” was rated more valuable than any self-congratulatory success. In fact, the first big stepping stone for a student was to come to terms with the reality of just how often we were “asleep.” Working to become present started with acknowledging that we weren’t.
When Mrs. Popoff stood, there was a rootedness about her. I later came to be aware that she had a practice of putting her attention into the small of her back and being present from there. Even though she was all of five foot one, I often had the sense that she was a giant. I’m sure it was her presence that loomed over me and made grown men and women quake when confronted.
Yet she herself worked unceasingly. When an “opportunity” arose—an irritation, a moment of like or dislike, a negative impression—she would rub her hands together and say, “Oh goody!”
The unspoken message being “NOW I can work!”
Thank you for this Roberta. Just reading about her is an inspiration.
What stood out to me was her Love and compassion. She was a nurturing teacher. She was like a loving grandmother to me in my late teens and early twenties. She believed that humanity was entering the time of “the man of unity,” She created a symbol she called the “enneagram of the man of unity” which showed the importance of simultaneity and synchronicity in the dimension of eternity –outside of the normal flow of time, experienced by consciously entering into the state of Love and compassion.