The Gurdjieff Movements require an intense process of personal contemplation not only for understanding, but also for assimilation into one’s way of being. It is helpful to outline a few of the essential perspectives which help to open understanding of a Movement.
Body Scan: Movements postures indicate localization of sensation in particular areas of the body through physical tension or force as well as via “pointing” with the fingers or “scanning” with the palms. Extended arms indicate an area around the body in one’s atmosphere to be sensed. In terms of the muscles tensing in the body, this opens the possibility of looking at the movements “structurally” to see, from an anatomical perspective, which muscle groups are being activated. Pointers could then be given to students in the class on better and more effective “active engagement” in any given posture, with clearer sensation. In other words, the raw engagement of the body in the act of moving draws sensation to particular areas, although it is subtle enough the practitioner must sense this effect and intentionally strengthen the movement of sensation. Many of these “indicators of sensation” are abstract in such as way as to be devoid of emotional attitude or intellectual ideas. For instance, an arm posture in which the upper arm is held at the horizontal in a 90 degree relationship to the torso and the elbow is bent such that the foream and upper arm are in a 90 degree relationship forces the practitioner to try and “sense” the relationship of the parts of the body but has little emotional content like the crossing of arms on the chest with a bowed head or the intellectual content of an enneagram traced in the air.
Power Postures: Movements contain emotionally evocative postures and expressions. They evoke attitudes or feelings. Fortitude, humility, despair, joy, and many other qualities are expressed through the body, either as a whole or in some part. The use of postures to evoke specific emotions opens up a connection between the Gurdjieff Movements with “power postures” being explored in cognitive neuroscience recently.
Symbolic: Many Movements postures require interpretation or relate to ideas. Whether it is the drawing of a hexagram with the hand, tracing circles of various sizes in the air, or using the hands to indicate the idea of “inner listening”, the Movements are full of subtle indications. Contemplation of the meaning of Movements postures strengthens the ability to read non-verbal body language as part of self and other observation, allowing one to see the “meaning” behind the manifestation. The requirement to hold long sequences and pull together small pieces spread out over the entirety of a Movement builds the capacity to see baseline and clusters, an important heuristic in body language and nonverbal communication. On the other hand, the symbolism of some Movements convey stories containing epic mythology, personal transformational journeys, teacher/student relationships, group dynamics, or religious ideas which then open the possibility of new emotional landscapes. The symbolism feeds back into the other two in that symbolic pointing to areas of the body or around the body open up areas to “scan” through sensation, and emotionally in that when one correctly interprets and understands the attitude being conveyed one is then able to try and “feel” the relevant state, that is produce the emotion in themselves. There is an important “symbolism of scales” which invites contemplation of the nature of self and other, inside and outside, in a way that leads to transpersonal understandings.
Combinatorial indications: Movements postures and sequences simultaneously evoke sensations, emotions, and ideas, sometimes synergistically, and other times dissonantly. The dissonance creates strong discriminative contrast between the centers so that synergistic versions may be felt that much more strongly. The overall body posture may create strong overall physical sensation of oneself, while the positioning of the body to suddenly face another dancer evokes a strong emotion. The evocation of strong sensation in one posture may then flow into and suffuse the emotion of the next moment, with the posture the body is still holding serving to anchor the dancer through the experience. The mind may at the same time be occupied with tracking one’s place in the group formation, that is, hovering above the interpersonal dynamic at the level of the group mind. In other words, if one examines the effect of Movements sequences, one finds that the centers are alternately twisted toward and away from eachother in every dynamic possible. This serves to both separate an awareness of the centers (provided one is contemplating the movement and one’s experience of it) as well as discover unique ways of deploying them in an overall relatedness that nonetheless harnesses their unique capacities. Movements open up the possibility of intentionally fostering attitudes and emotions in combination with body scanning and center of gravity of one’s sense of self as well as symoblism, i.e. ideas. For instance, a dancer could be intentionally flustered by a sequence intentionally structured to be impossible, at the same time one aspect of a more stable and easy to follow posture indicates calmness. And so on.
Transpersonal: The shifting of the center of gravity of awareness into now one, now another center, or between what one is personally doing versus what the group is doing, or dispersing awareness into various scales of time, gradually opens up new organs of awareness. The sense of self, the sense of being located in the head or the chest, depending on one’s initial starting point, begins to shift and move. This begins as small intuitions or ideas but gradually the sense of self can transfer completely into different areas of one’s own body, other people in the group, or one’s surrounding physical environment. In the same way, the use of sequence in a highly novel way can juggle the sense of one’s position in space and time, opening up insights into how the perception of time arises through our constant moment to moment projections and predictions as we move through space. Unique sequences and “false starts” can give rise to unexpected juxtapositions which reveal previously unnoticed and highly subtle assumptions made right at the heart of the present moment. This is done through an interesting overlapping or “canon” in which many successive moments are felt so acutely that one can no longer see in which moment one is. In other words, if the memory of the past and projection of the future are so strongly visualized that their signature matches that of the present posture taken, one can begin to sense the way in which the present is itself a kind of odd projection which can only arise in the context of a perceived sequence of actions. Impossible to describe.
The All and Everything Review 