Gurdjieff’s Sacred Dances and Movements: Tabasheer Zutshi
The significance of the body is its role as our sole instrument of experience, expression, and communication.
The Movements, codified in a body of knowledge called “The Fourth Way“ or “The Work”, were created by Greek Armenian mystic G.I. Gurdjieff. As practices in awareness and self remembering, combined with an extensive body of music and writings, the sacred dances emerged as a distilled concentrate of Gurdjieff’s oral teachings on the human condition and transformation.
The Movements provide a method for participants to experience two co-existing realities within themselves. One pole corresponds to one’s real possibility – the awakening of consciousness, the development of being, presence to an essential unceasing unity. The other pole corresponds to the way we actually live, enslaved by our own automatism, our reactions, our sleep.
The Movements demand great effort and sustained attention as participants are required to coordinate complicated head, arm, and leg movements with mental exercises. The effort to perform them correctly leads to the development of a finer, more refined quality of attention in which the mechanical flow of associations ceases. As the movements begin to integrate with awareness, the body relaxes and the mind stills. When inner attention is maintained, there is a free flow of energy through the body. We become spacious. New channels of energy, previously inaccessible, can be received and transformed by the dancer. At this point, the Movements become truly sacred, both in their inner content and their outer manifestation.
The methodology of learning and embodying the dance are woven intricately with contemplative exercises, readings, conversations, and playful experimentation. Here lies the possibility of awakening to another self, to the indivisible presence we share with each other.
Over five days, this Movements intensive will give you time to draw breath and pause, for you to be with yourself in trust and wholeness. It will create experiential views that are non-habitual and different from your usual states of being. It will create spaces of meaning where you will not be judged by others, nor hopefully by yourselves, but allow a creation to arise.
About the Facilitator: Tabasheer Zutshi is a Gurdjieff Movements facilitator and artist. She explores Gurdjieff’s teachings from the perspective of contemporary life, constantly enriching her facilitation with new research and practices. She has been teaching the movements over nine years to a disparate community. Her diverse influences have been shaped by mentors from the direct lineage of Gurdjieff, a practice of Iyengar yoga, and art through the prism of colour, mark-making, and gesture. She is a student of Tibetan Buddhism.
Shared by a former participant – “Your left arm, bent at the elbow, moves in an arc in front of your body. Each movement is mathematically precise, 45 degree angles in clockwise motion timed to your inner metronome. Your right arm hasn’t begun moving yet – you hold its movement in your mind. Your mind, you have been shown, is of limitless possibility. You are aware of what you cannot hold yet – movements of feet and head, chants in unison with step. You look around for a moment to orient yourself to others – the group is interdependent, a single organism. In that moment you are aware of your harmony with the organism. In that moment you have lost the position of your arm. You return, back to awareness. Back to zero.”
| By Donation | Eligibility: 21 & Over | Medium Intensity |
The workshop will begin on March 21st morning and end on March 25th evening. All sessions are mandatory.
Schedule–
7.15 am – 8:00 am – Morning sitting and inner exercises
8:00 am – 9.30 am – Breakfast
9.30 am – 12:00 pm – Group work (with tea break)
12:00 pm – 2.30 pm – Lunch
2.30pm – 6:00 pm – Group work (with tea break)
6:00 pm – Dinner