Practices

The Gurdjieff Work is a comprehensive, integrated system of ideas and practices that can lead to the awakening of a greater spiritual understanding of oneself and one's world.

Gurdjieff left a body of ideas and practical methods suited for people living in the modern world. His ideas shed an entirely new light on many of the most fundamental issues we experience as human beings. The Work may be carried into all aspects of our ordinary lives: family, community, work, study, recreation.  These can all become a part of the living laboratories that are our lives.

Because the essential truths of the teaching are of a higher order than the realm of our ordinary consciousness, Gurdjieff developed a system that includes exercises of mind and body. These assist in the struggle with habitual resistances, leading to sustained and greater awareness.

The Work explores the natural connection between psychology, science, and spiritual development, always beginning with where one finds oneself now, in the moment.  

The Rochester Gurdjieff Center has a current membership of about 45 people, all of whom live “in the world” with all the attendant challenges and responsibilities. The center provides a full complement of activities and training which includes: weekly group meetings; weekly Movements classes; groups which study G. I. Gurdjieff’s writings; music study groups; private talks for individual exchange; and short and long “work periods” for more intensive work together under the principles of self-study established by G. I. Gurdjieff. 

Members of the Rochester Gurdjieff Center regularly attend conferences and workshops with members of other national and international Gurdjieff Work groups around the common theme of “work on oneself.”

“Self-study is the means of acquiring a special inner attention which participates in the inner state of connectedness, and also serves for acquiring exact knowledge of conditions leading to higher states of consciousness—those in which knowledge has a universality and timelessness far beyond that of ordinary subjective knowledge.”
- Christopher Fremantle