My Life And Experience In a Gurdjieff Group: Morning Preparation on the First Anniversary of Mme de Salzmann's Death.

Saturday, 19 June 2010

Morning Preparation on the First Anniversary of Mme de Salzmann's Death.

One exercise that all group members were asked to do every day was 'morning preparation' which involved sitting quietly in a straight-backed chair first thing every morning for about 10 minutes and trying to 'sense'. I remember one member asking why we didn't call this meditation, to which Dorothy replied, "meditation is really quite advanced. Today a lot of things are called meditation which aren't really meditation." Thinking of this reminds me of a remarkable experience I had on the anniversary of Mme Jeanne de Salzmann's death (Mme de Salzmann, who died in 1990 aged 101, was the person most responsible for preserving Mr Gurdjieff's work). It was Saturday 25th May and there was a Work day arranged at Wincanton on that day. Before leaving we were asked to do try to do the 'morning preparation' for a full half-hour in honour of Mme De Salzmann's memory. I struggled sometimes to do the exercise for 10 minutes and worried that a full half-hour would be beyond me. Nevertheless, I managed it. What astonished me was the observation that Jim (who was responsible for leading our design class in Bristol) made at the meeting that was held at Wincanton later that day - "when we were told to do the 'morning preparation' for half an hour I thought, oh here we go, this is going to be a struggle. I'm never going to manage it. But the longer I stayed with the exercise the more I became sensitive to the fact that I was being helped - there was an energy from outside that was coming in and enabling me to do the exercise in a way that I never imagined would be possible." I cannot replicate every word he said from memory but I can remember sitting there feeling astonished because everything he said was exactly as I had experienced the exercise myself. George Phillpotts replied, "well, when you consider that there were people in all parts of Europe trying to do the exercise at precisely the same time" to which Dorothy added, "and I think that's a good point on which to the end the meeting."

via gurdjieffwork1986-2008.blogspot.com