Sacred Movement

The Gurdjieff Movements, or Sacred Dances, are one of the primary tools that G. I. Gurdjieff used for the development of the human organism. Although there is general agreement in the power of these movements and the importance of their practice, not much has been written regarding how to learn and teach them or which approaches lead to the most efficient use and maximum benefits from them. Today we will briefly look into the mechanisms involved as well as some of the common misconceptions and problematic approaches toward them.

Within the Gurdjieff teaching are specific references to functioning centers of the bodymind: instinctive, sex, moving, emotional, intellectual, and higher centers. Forms of movement, including sports, yoga, tai chi, dance, and gymnastics, are traditionally taught by imitation, that is, through the moving center. This is the natural form of learning for moving activity—imitation of a teacher or mentor who knows how to move. There is also an element of intellect, or formatory thinking, involved in beginning new movements. This is an awkward phase in which the head brain directs the body until the body "knows" the movement in itself. Once this phase is passed, the movement becomes more fluid and balanced, because the moving center works at a much higher speed than the head brain.

It is this awkward initial phase that is normally thought of as constituting instruction. Learning by imitation is largely ignored is modern society, in part because of the responsibility it puts on the teacher. Most teachers are unaware of their own movements, and in turn they are negligent of the impact their movements have on their students. Parents routinely tell their children to do things that they themselves do not provide a model to imitate. Then the parents become frustrated when children, who naturally learn by imitating, or playing, imitate their actions instead of doing what they are told, which would really constitute inventing a new way of being. This kind of invention is not within the abilities of a child or of anyone beginning a new activity. We must have learned an activity and become dissatisfied with its results before coming to the creative act of inventing something new.

So far we have surveyed ordinary movement activity (which actually includes most activity). We must now differentiate "sacred" activities. Sacred activities, and sacred objects, have some connection with what could be called higher realms, or higher scales of reality. Ceremonies, such as marriage or baptism, are considered sacred, as are certain religious artifacts. Sacred texts, such as the gospels, are written with ordinary words, yet make this connection with things beyond the ordinary. This "beyond" can be seen as closer to the source of creation, or the cause for our existence. Most conceptions of God or Absolute are included in this "beyond." A sacred form of movement would therefore necessarily include some way of connecting with this higher realm that would be neither random nor accidental.

One way of adding more precision to movement is to use more functional centers to increase the quality of integrity. The instinctive center works with sensation; the emotional center, with feeling; the higher centers, with even more complexes of intelligence. All these centers work as fast or faster than moving center and would not slow down the function as intellectual interference does. Learning to apply these types of intelligence (not intellect) to movement would create a different kind of movement, one that uses ordinary movement to connect with things beyond the ordinary (like sacred writings).

First we must verify that we do imitate, so that afterward we can begin to learn to not imitate. Otherwise the movements will just make us feel good but give no tangible results. As stated above, people are not aware that they imitate, or how this imitation effects their mechanics. A crystallized result of our imitation is called posture, and as Gurdjieff’s teaching tells us, each person has a limited number of subjective postures from which to mechanically operate. In order to perform sacred movement, these postures must be temporarily discarded in favor of objective postures. However, each person’s identity, their sense of who they are, is contained in their posture, and leaving this identity is quite disorienting. Without adequate preparation, people are psychologically incapable of leaving their postures. Even with preparation and support, it is still difficult and emotionally unsettling.

Each person must learn to recognize and study the effects of their own subjective postures on each of the centers necessary for sacred movement. Recognizing the sensation and emotion of regular postures will provide for verification of entering objective postures, or non-postures, which will have an unfamiliar taste and feeling. Because the flow of mental associations depends on these familiar postures, cessation of associations in the head brain can also be a verification of objective postures. Once these objective postures are attained, energy flows and other phenomena will become evident, making the experience unmistakable. This is likely how Gurdjieff was able to organize the massive amount of material he worked with.

The temptation with Gurdjieff’s Movements is to duplicate the ordinary educational methods belonging to moving center, which at best would be based on imitation but most probably are based in an intellectual description. This is to profane the sacred. The truth of the movements is that there is no teacher to imitate. The movement will become sacred when subjective postures are left behind and objective postures, guided by multiple qualities of intelligence, flow in accordance with the music and forms of each dance. In this way Sacred Movement will be preserved.


KSR 3/1/01