Movements Traditions

The intensive training programs in the Ouspensky line, where everybody knows all the old Movements by heart, originated no doubt from the time that Gurdjieff demanded his pupils to exercise them, five to six hours a day, as preparation for the public demonstrations in Paris and in America. The focus on the newer exercises in the Foundation, and the way to connect them to inner work, stems from the last stage of Gurdjieff´s Movements teaching and the enthusiasm of Mme. Jeanne de Salzmann, who preserved many of these exercises. The readiness to experiment with new forms of Movements education, characteristic of the Bennett line, mirrors the open-mindedness of John Bennett himself.
The key supplied by this comparative effort, and the basic lesson to be learned is that no line is perfect. When you want the best of these three worlds you have to sacrifice your isolation and start working together. That means to co-operate without being incorporated. This is what we in the Berlin and Amsterdam Movement groups have done.
Two years ago, we organised in Amsterdam an exchange on the subject of the "old" Movements between our group and a group of the original "Ouspensky" line. To our surprise, Mrs. van Oyen, one of the two living members of Ouspensky's London group, turned up to join us and when asked why, given her extreme old age, she replied, "I saw many years ago how the Work had split itself into small fractions. Now I heard that an effort is being made to unite what I had seen drift apart, and for this reason I insisted on being present. Only if we work together will there be results!"
This is a direction we hope will continue.