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Gurdjieff Sacred Movements were created and discovered by a Greek-Armenian mystic G.I. Gurdjieff in the late 19th century and the beginning of 20th century, after traveling around central Asia looking for esoteric knowledge in ancient mystic schools. They are part of the “Fourth Way System.” The Fourth Way means it is an integration of the other three ways. The first way is that of fakirs who fight against the body. The second way is that of devotional monks, a way of emotions. And the third way is that of yogis, which focuses on the intellect. Nevertheless these three ways only focus on one part of human structure, leaving the other two unbalanced. And the Fourth Way work on the harmony of all the three centers—body, mind, emotions—simultaneously, so that we can become the master of them rather than being the slave of the ignorance, conflicts and chaos as a result of the unbalance and fight of the centers. When the alignment of the system is attained, we open the channel for higher energy to descend. As the Fourth Way emphasis on the practice on daily life, it is very suitable for the modern urban people.

Enneagram symbol

Gurdjieff introduced the wisdom of Enneagram into the western world and the movement was his key teaching. He has embodied his teachings in Sacred Dances, which is one of the reasons why they are called sacred. Gurdjieff has consolidated some ancient ritual during his journey around central Asia and created some movements originated from the quality of Essence. They are also known as “the Science of Movements,” as they break the normal habitual moving patterns in each human being and the specific movements can create certain centering, meditative effects, such as silence, awareness, and warrior-hood. Also known as “Objective Arts,” in contrast to subjective arts which falls into emotional catharsis in modern age, they are meant to arouse feelings of the higher emotional center, such as humility, emptiness, silence, bliss, dignity, receptivity, sublimity….  (listen to the objective music of Gurdjieff sacred dance)

Gurdjieff discovered that much of a universal wisdom coming from ancient traditions was transmitted through music and dance. In temples, monasteries and special schools he visited, the dances were varieties of movements and postures that were similar to an alphabet, that could be read as books for those who could interpret it. So in the evening when the priests and the priestesses danced in the hall of the temple, one could read in these postures the truths that were implanted in them several thousands of years ago and which are transmitted in this way from one generation to another. That is why the movement is called Sacred Dance. (refer to the book "Meetings with Remarkable Men" by G.I. Gurdjieff)

        The 3 elements of human nature are always participating in the movements: The movements of our body, our heart, our mind are brought in a harmonic exchange with each other, in a certain common vibration. Hence the importance of the presence of the 3 components:

• the intellectual part through a specific quality of attention, but also sometimes through counting, repetitions of words or statements

• the emotional part may be given by the music which will trigger a specific inner state , or the remembrance of a brother, sister et… or  the suggestion to enter a special  feeling

• the practice of the movements is the discipline of balance and harmony. Intellectual discipline, emotional discipline is called forth along the physical discipline.

   2-Days workshop

This weekend will be a beginning to Gurdjieff Sacred Movements. Participants will experience the quality of such a work through a series focused movements, accompanied by specific music, in a meditative atmosphere. Osho meditations, stretches, sharing, and the Fourth Way knowledge will be included to strengthen the integration of body, mind and emotion.

4-Days workshop

            We will continue our journey of level one to deepen and widen our experiences and self-discovery in inner work. The advantage of participating four days in a row is that it enables us to deepen our connection to ourselves in various meditation techniques, to increase our capacity of dancing with awareness along or in group, and to have more understanding towards oneself or the system.

             The complexity and depth of the dances will be increased, compared to those taught in 2D. We are going to practice dances such as prayer, Enneagram dance, dervish dance, multiplication or other group dances which embody the beauty of the order of the universe. We would offer the environment for you to experience the beauty, sublime-ness, and the effects of science of the dances. In addition to the dances, we would also give an inner practice each day so that we not only experience the outer form but also awareness, centering, watchfulness, and inner stillness.

             In the afternoon, the theme that we would introduce in these four days would be focused on how we observe ourselves. We wish that it bridges inner work to daily life and you can have more tools and understandings in seeing your patterns and, most importantly, have a new vision.

     We sincerely invite to join the four-day journey with us and we will do our best to take care of you.

Note

1. Please come with clothes suitable for exercises. As little personal ornaments and makeup as possible.

2. Bright sweat towel and drink

3. Light food recommended.

4. Please be on time.

5. Good rest, take care of your body.

6. If you have any disease or taking any medicine, please inform the trainer in advance.

"Living in your personality, means you accept and love yourself. This kind of love makes you relax and this is the beginning of transformation and healing"    from the Enneagram Personality Types book by Priya

Instructor: Priya (Taiwanese)

        Priya has committed to inner work for years. Her main focus is on Gurdjieff Movements, Zen Theater <ii>, the Enneagram Personality Types (including the cause of personality and defensive mechanism of our ego) and Osho Meditation. Her teaching on Sacred Dance will therefore focus on watching the personality pattern.  She shares her work in Europe and Taiwan. She is a graduate of Taiwan University on language and is also the translator of many Osho books (奧修說自我、種子綠大地、奧修說孩童、隨他去吧、成佛前的奇遇) and the writer of an Enneagram Personality Types book in Chinese <你 ，到底是誰？人格九型密碼 iii>. Her great pleasure is to enjoy every moment on the sacred dance (including do it wrongly), allow everything to happen and growth.

        <ii>  Zen Theatre is similar to drama therapy, Following the guidance of teacher on inner work, the participants experience theirs true Essence. It merge the outer/ dynamic expression of drama, and the inner work of Zen. So it is called Zen Theatre.

    <iii> The book is based on the author's many years experience on Zen Theatre. From the perspective of first person sharing, introduce the personality pattern, belief system, relation, usual problem in life and the potential on transformation. The reader can realize his own psychic structure, thinking pattern, emotional reaction, attitude, major fear and spiritual growth.

Gurdjieff Movements—A Journey

Priya

        I have been studying Gurdjieff Movements for several years, and it has never been a static journey. I started in Osho’s commune in Poona, India with a six-week training. At that time, I was a beginner in meditation and knew little about who Gurdjieff was and what the Fourth Way was about. I was there simply because they needed a translator. As all the dances were set movements which required precision, I committed myself in doing them well—as I was an Enneatype One! I also practiced polishing my awareness to the body and to the outside environment, such as listening to the music, being in tune with other dancers, by doing each movement properly. I thought that now that the dancers were not to be identified with the body, mind, and emotions, or they would make mistakes, perhaps it was the non-identification and the consciousness that transcended the three things that they aimed at.

I spent quite a few years participating in more trainings. Apart from keeping the awareness to the circumference, observing the identification on body, mind, emotion, checking out my level of awareness according to the precision and mistakes in the movements, I could slowly see how the movements worked on me. For instance, once after continuous mistakes, frustration exploded in me, and I was pissed at myself. However, seeing the emotions, there was a voice inside of me that said, “Priya, look, you are such a number one!” With this humor, I stopped attacking myself and accepted where I was. I also used to be a slave of laziness and therefore tended to run away from what I didn’t like or was afraid of. But when I was reading Gurdjieff’s book, Meetings with Remarkable Men, I was so touched by how he went through the kinds of challenges that we couldn’t possibly imagine. So now after practicing going through the defensive layer in me that kept saying, “This is not what I want. I would like it to be easier,” I would roll up my sleeves and say “Let’s see what we can do with this challenge!” That made a big difference in my life: much less complaints and much more juice. I owe the credit to Gurdjieff’s teaching. Yesterday I was practicing an Enneagram dance. When I saw it as a group dance, it was awesome, as if telling a story of the universe. And when I was dancing it yesterday, allowing the music to flow in the heart, doing the movements, joy, inspiration and openness arose in me, as if I were going through different stages of life with joy. The more I dance, the more I can understand why those movements are also called “objective art.” There are times when tears welled up in my eyes, feeling so touched…as if a deep longing in the heart was fulfilled, and an entrance to the vast universe was opened up to a sublime and indescribable force. I felt utterly humble.

Apart from such beauty—as it is the only word that I can come up with this feeling—I would like to take more about the laziness that I have just mentioned. Let’s start with an Osho quote.

        The life you are living is not even a life. It can’t be. How can it be life if there is no light in you? How can it be life if there is no love in you? How can it be life if you function mechanically? Only with consciousness does life arrive—not by birth but by consciousness. Only a meditator starts beginning to live. Others are befooling themselves, they are not really living. They may be doing a thousand and one things—they go in doing, to the very end they go on doing. Accumulating wealth, achieving power, fulfilling this ambition and that, they go on and on. But still, the total, the sum total of their lives is nil.

Interviewing the sixty-year-old rodeo champion in Austin, Texas, the New York newspaperman remarked, “You are really an extraordinary man to be a rodeo champion at your age.”

“Shucks,” said the cowboy, “I am not nearly the man my Pa is. He is still place-kicking for a football team and he is eighty-six.”

“Amazing!” gasped the journalist. “I’d like to meet your father.”

“Can’t right now. He is in El Paso standing up for Grandpa. Grandpa is getting married tomorrow. He’s a hundred and fourteen.”

“Your family is simply unbelievable,” said the newspaperman. “Here you are, a rodeo champion at sixty, your father is a football player at eighty-six, and now your grandfather wants to get married at a hundred and fourteen.”

“Hell, mister, you got that wrong,” said the Texan. “Grandpa does not want to get married. He has to.”

This way life goes on and on to the very end. This is not real life. You are just a victim—a victim of your unconscious instinct, a victim of biology, a victim of physiology, a victim of nature. This is the bondage. To be free of all this unconsciousness is liberation. To be free of the bondage of your body chemistry; to be free of the bandage of the program that nature has put in your body cells, to be free of all that is unconscious in you, to be on your own, to be a conscious life—that is the beginning of real life. Count your age only from the moment when you start living consciously, fully alert, meditatively. When each act has the flavor of consciousness, then you are coming closer to home; otherwise you are going further and further away.

The Secret of the Golden Flower, Chapter 27

Gurdjieff also says, “Man is a machine.” Some people find the movements difficult in the beginning because they are meant to break your patterns and automatism and bring you something new. For instance, you may find that when a certain emotion arises in you, there is also a corresponding movement happening in the body, and vice verse. An example would be that when you are tense and want to protect yourself, you may find your shoulders tense. And when you tense your shoulders, you may find yourself feeling tense and protective. So when a person has a certain emotion and thinking pattern, the body would also dwell in a corresponding gesture. As a person has limited patterns, they have only restricted ways of moving. Many of Gurdjieff movements are originated from ancient mystic schools, or Gurdjieff invented them from the space of essence, and to have a taste of that, breaking our patterns and automatism would be the condition. When those movements are done properly, without ourselves “coloring” them, we are in contact with a certain essential space that is triggered by the movements. However, in this process, the dancers would inevitably confront themselves with their own patterns as they are only used to them rather than the foreign movements. And Gurdjieff Movements create such a good occasion for us to see the “frictions” inside clearly. In my experience, I used to touch my defense mechanism, the repressed emotions, and all kinds of reactions and fights happening in fear that my “perfect” image would be broken. But seeing how my ego and image strive (the ego by no means wants to die, and it just wants to go on believing what it has been believing so far) in dancing as well in relationships and in daily life, let-go and healing started happening in me, “Oh, yes, thank you, my ego, for coming again. Now let’s see how we can live with more creativity, love, and consciousness—what would I like to choose in this moment?”

The path of Gurdjieff Movement is not that of therapy, but of meditation. I have been studying the Enneagram Personality Types and Gurdjieff Movements for several years, I can’t help but feeling there is every necessity of them working together. The Enneagram Personality Types has helped to see myself, how I reacted to protect my image, how I reacted as a result of my defense mechanism, when I was nothing but a machine, how I was a victim of those habitual thinking and emotional patterns, and so on so forth. All these has supported me not to be identified, and to have clarity in orientating myself when needed, rather than being so confused and overwhelmed. The moment of seeing is liberating. Without such a map, I might be utterly disorientated and spending much more time understanding what I am doing. However, the capacity to “see” is by no means less important; or even if I can see what belongs to the personality, without the part that is deeper and bigger than the personality, I am again lost and have no choice but to be trapped by that personality. It is significant to support ourselves to be connected with this part. After all, the ego is very subtle, and there are so many challenges in our daily life, we certainly need a way to deepen our watchfulness, to center ourselves, and to remain at home no matter what the circumference is like.

My vision on the role of an instructor keeps changing too. I used to think in terms of how “I” can do better, how “I” can lead. But the more I practice the dances, the more I find that the more absent the dancer is, the more the dance overflows. And the Movements in themselves are a complete and vast system, including the universal laws, how to develop the three centers harmoniously, how to keep the centers in alignment rather than helplessly allowing them interfering with each other, how to be connected with the inner watcher and essence and the application, knowledge and practice of that. I started understanding why my teacher always call ourselves “transmitters.” We are simply transmitting a system, while supporting the group space and the process of each participant (e.g. “What do I do with this emotion?” with my experiences in me and in others, and my presence. I really have my full commitment in this way of inner work. I wish that one day there could be a group of people who would like to go deeper and deeper in this direction rather than always staying at the initial. Because then we can do a lot. As a dancer goes deeper in themselves and in the dance, there are so many layers to experience, just as at the initial stage we learn how to sing, but after familiarizing ourselves with that, we can sing something with completion and even create a chorus. How much beauty and fun it is going to be! And there are quite a few dances that are done in a group for the dancers to experience “individuals within the cosmos order,” and the oneness of that, which for me, was awesome. As Gurdjieff has embodied his teachings in the dances, what we experience in the dances cannot be separate from our inner process and its manifestation in our daily life. And for that, there is again so much to share and to play with. This is what I would like to create and share in the future with no doubt, and imagine what a bliss it will be!

With Love, Priya

Present at the moment

Krize

The first time I experienced sacred dance was in an Enneagram Personality Types energy workshop in Taiwan in 2005. In the experiential workshop, the German facilitator Prasadam lead us to move on top of a large Enneagram symbol and let us play the character of different EnneaTypes, explore their inner world and experience the energy flow inside their body.  In that workshop, the Taiwan facilitator Priya was responsible to lead us on the sacred dance. The movements were special. When my mind was floating around, I did the movements wrongly and have to be centered.

I've studied the Enneagram Personality Types for almost 10 years. This was a journey of self-exploring and self-acknowledge, full of fun and growth.   Enneagram Personality Types is a map for spiritual growth, help me effectively understand my strength and weakness, the most important is the direction of my soul development. The uniqueness of  Enneagram Personality Types is that not only there is horizontal distinction between different personality types, but also the vertical dynamic psychological health development. 

From the experience of practicing Enneagram Personality Types on my real life, I acknowledge I can trust my talent on intuition, following the guidance to develop my energy work and balance my body, mind and spirit.  For example, sometimes I feel stuck due to laziness, or anxious at the the bottleneck. I utilize my expertise on crystal, by carrying the Smokey or Ruby crystal to transform my energy, I feel energized to go, go, go. 

I once used Tarot card to help my EnneaType 3 friend on the career prospect issue. He got lost of the future. The card was "restriction", that means he was at a status of EnneaType 9.  He didn't express his capacity freely and feel helpless. It doesn't mean EnneaType 3 is better than EnneaType 9. In the principles of Enneagram Personality Type, every types are equal important. The difference of each individual is the health level. Take my friend for illustration, he was afraid of  being criticized too show off in his individual work performance and upset the other colleagues, he suppressed his capability. I encouraged him to face and accept his character, at the same time to learn the team work of EnneaType 6.

So why do I continue to repeat some mistakes even though I already know? Many years ago, I had participated in a motivation training. I fully expressed my potential and feel great. However, after some time, I returned to my old pattern and left only a good memory. Later on, I realized that in order to acknowledge and express the true Essence behind my personality, the secret is to observe myself, which is the Awareness when I am present at the moment. The leading internal Enneagram Personality Types teachers  Don & Russ and Helen Palmer have emphasized the importance of body movement on being Present. Referring to my experience on practicing sacred dance in the Enneagram workshop, when I am present, I experience to liberate from the personality limitation.

When I returned to HK, I started to read the books about Gurdjieff. I was impressed by his Fourth Way System. The book mentioned the application of the Enneagram symbol, including the Octave of the Western music. He told his students that the secret of Enneagram symbol can be understood through practicing sacred dance. I tried to put my training process into the Enneagram symbol and got some insight, including the importance of  impact from group practice.  Through the message on a Systemic Constellation session on my Wholeness work plan,  I affirm the urgency of practicing sacred dance. By coincidence, Priya promises my invitation to lead a sacred dance workshop in HK on March 18-19.

Love, Krize

noon, Feb 6, 2006

Note : When I attended the First International Asia Conference for Systemic Constellations in Taiwan in 2006, a session of Gurdjieff Dance performance was arranged by the organizer. It was a sacred and amazing experience. The Taiwan Hellinger Institute uses Gurdjieff Dance to develop the ability of sensation and observation for their students. The Taiwan U-Theatre (優劇團) also adopts Gurdjieff Dance in the foundation training of their dancers. I desire to have public performance in HK sometime in future. 

Question:  What is the relationship of Gurdjieff Dance and Enneagram Personality Types?

Krize answers:

•  Both Gurdjieff Dance and Enneagram Personality Types have applied the wisdom of Enneagram symbol. Though Enneagram Personality Types aren't discussed during the teaching of Gurdjieff Dance, practicing Gurdjieff Dance can assist on achieving the ultimate goal of learning Enneagram Personality Types: Presence. 

• When learning Enneagram Personality Types (through other courses), we understand the characteristics of our personality types. But some students only reply on the personality description by the teachers and are lacking of self observation.  During practicing Gurdjieff Dance, student clearly observes one's routine pattern on personal attitude and behavior. This awareness is the key starting point of spiritual growth.

• Enneagram Personality Types has divided the personality into three major energy centers : belly, heart , head. Usually each personality type will bias on using certain one or two energy centers. When the three energy centers are in disorder and disturbed each other, our personality will fall into lower health level. Practicing Gurdjieff Dance is to help us balance the three energy centers, liberate from the personality pattern and acknowledge our sacred Essence.