A Tribute to Gurdjieff and his Influence on Ida Rolf

January, being the month of his birth, people in Gurdjieff groups all around the world gather together, in person or on zoom, to celebrate Jan. 13, the day the spiritual teacher G.I. Gurdjieff was born. To use the word spiritual is not ideal though, as it conjures to mind the idea that it is not real, or something imaginary. Gurdjieff taught a system of development where one tried to bring into harmony the mind, body, and emotions through the cultivation of attention and consciousness. I suppose that may sound more real than the term spiritual. If you read my blogs, then you may already know that Ida Rolf was influenced by Gurdjieff's ideas and practices, as she was a student of J.G. Bennett, one of Gurdjieff's well known students.

The primary idea in Gurdjieff/Bennett's teaching is that we go throughout our days not being conscious of ourselves. We are either identified with things outside ourselves or with thoughts, emotions, and even urges of the body. This being so, our day to day lives are lived in a very low degree of consciousness, we sleep walk through our daily lives. To wake up from sleep, there must be some sort of shock. We can apply this shock to ourselves by Self Remembering. Self Remembering is the act of bringing a dual attention to the self and what we are doing in the outside world at the same time. This allows for a greater sort of consciousness. Over time this will allow energies in the body to develop and transform, and the transformation of these energies will transform the individual over time.

Ida Rolf had many influences. She worked and studied with osteopaths, she practiced yoga, and she was a biochemist by education, but we know she was deeply influenced by Gurdjieff's ideas as she spent her summers in a retreat-like fashion with Bennett at his center. Also, Ida gave lectures and presentations to the Gurdjieff Society of London and other centers as well. This all came together during the rise of the human potential movement of the 60's, so it was good timing. Gurdjieff had passed away by then but left groups and leaders of those groups behind all over the world, and Bennett was a well known leader in America and the England.

Lets talk about how some of these ideas pertain to Rolfing specifically. First there is the idea that attention and consciousness has a transformative effect of its own. We can dig into muscles, stretch them, exercise them, but it is bringing the conscious attention to the sensation of the body that allows things to begin to find their proper place, their right relationship. The use of excess force and unnecessary muscle tension works against us. It waists energy and does not allow our vital energies to flow. For Gurdjieff it was important to be relaxed, as it allows us to store up energy. For Rolf, it was important to allow a proper relationship to gravity. Ida Rolf also taught developing a relationship with the body through movement. Gurdjieff and Bennett also did, but through Gurdjieffs elaborate and difficult choreographed temple dances, refereed to simply as The Movements. Ida's movement exercises are less extravagant and might be compared to Moshe Feldenkrais' system of movement develpment. Feldenkrais was also a fellow student of Bennett.

Gurdijeff brought a system of eastern ideas to the west well before any other eastern ideas had taken hold, Theosophy being the exception. He died before the human potential movement of the 60's, but left a thriving tradition behind that would be eagerly swept up by that current. Although most of that current was about self help, which really just serves the ego, Gurdjeff's teaching is about transformation, not into what we want to be, but into what we really are. In many ways, on a physical level at least, Rolfing also serves to put us in touch with what we really are, helping us to unload much of the baggage we have be carrying around in our bodies. We live in a world were we commonly believe that spiritual ideas are not practice, but perhaps you can see that there are exceptions. To Gurdjieff, everything is material, the body, the emotions, even thought, so working with these things is practical.

It is not necessary to study Gurdjieff's ideas to have success with Rolfing, Ida's system is it's own thing, but anyone who is interested may want to take a look at P.D. Ouspenky's book In Search of the Miraculous, originally entitled Fragments of an Unknown Teaching. People generally find Ouspensky's writings easier to read than Gurdjieff's. Also, Bennett has put out a substantial body of writing as well.

To those who feel called by these writing, there are many Gurdjieff groups throughout the world that work with his ideas together. The Gurdjieff Foundation in the U.S. and Europe have been put together from the largest body of his surviving students after he died and is considered to be the strongest lineage. There are Bennett groups still going strong as well, though Bennett and his groups certainly have their own spin on the tradition, bringing in lots of other world traditions as well. There are other groups too, some of them with less benevolent and or confused intentions, so use your better judgement when exploring them. And finally, the film Meetings with Remarkable Men directed by Peter Brook is a great story produced from Gurdjieff's autobiography of the same name. It illustrated his search for wisdom throughout the East and the Middle East, and has one of the few fully developed video renditions of the temple dances simply known as The Movements. Of all the things that he was, and the the people he influenced, he referred to himself as, a teacher of dance.

#gurdjieff #bennett #idarolf #rolfing #structuralintegration #feldenkrais