Newsletter 2/2003

Working on Movements with Children in Russia
by Plavan N. Go

Between January 24 and February 4, in Russia, I offered a two-week course on the movements for local teenagers. This was in response to an invitation from Tatiyana, a children's teacher at the Third Millennium Center, Vladivostock. For those who may not know, Vladivostock is on the eastmost border between the East and West, often compared with Istanbul that marksthe westmost border between the East and West. For me who live in Japan, the city was accessible by a two-hour flight.
The Third Millennium Center is an organization that specializes in developing latent abilities in children. Why in children and not in adults including yourself? To this question of mine, they told me that some unusual abilities they were interested in could be developed in men only in early childhood, a conclusion they arrived at after many experiments. They were particularly interested in the ability to "see" external objects without using the physical eyes. Even though I am not convinced of the spiritual value that they liked to associate with this ability, they have shown me with repeated demonstrations that some children actually had acquired this ability.
Easy for children but difficult for adults. They had this notion about the movements as well. Several months prior to my visit, Tatiyana learned some movements in Moscow from Amiyo Devienne, a French movement teacher with whom I worked for a long time in the past. After returning from Moscow, Tatiyana experimented with teaching these movements to children. The children surprised her by learning the movements with remarkable efficiency and enthusiasm. In September, at an international APEC fair, they did a public performance, in which they combined the demonstration of movements with the demonstration of some unusual abilities of the children. Later on, Tatiyana decided to ask me for a series of classes that would satisfy the children's growing interest in the movements.
Flying over the frozen ocean , I arrived Vladivostock on a small airplane that carried only two other passengers. The warmth and comfort in well-heated rooms were in sharp contrast to the extreme coldness of the outside air. This environment, besides being symbolic of the small community of people I have met there, had a beneficial effect on the practice of movements, waking us up to the sensations of the body and inviting us to appreciate them. Some Russians are so extreme in pursuing the sharpness of sensations that they go to ocean, strip off clothes, and dive into a hole in ice. A father to one of the children in this group, with whom I become particularly intimate, was a regular practitioner of this exercise. It is reported that a similar exercise was recommended by Gurdjieff, which is mentioned as "rubbing down oneself with cold water or ice."

I was welcomed by Tatiyana and a group of about 35 children. The strongest impression I had from these children was of purity. To a minor extent, I received the same impressions from their parents and a small community formed around them. It reminded me of a community in Grand Forks, North Dakota, where I have spent a year in my early youth. There were some similarities: a sizable community in a very cold region adequately unaffected by the influences from the modern civilization but not completely cut off from them.
The children learning the movements had been divided by Tatiyana into two classes, a senior class and a junior class. This division was not based on age but on their readiness. I worked mostly with the senior class, which consisted of children of various ages between 10 and 21. The junior class, to which I offered short sessions of preparatory exercises and elementary movements, consisted mainly of very small children and also allowed participation of adults, for whom more advanced form of movements invariably turned out to be difficult.
The children in the senior group, indeed, surprised me with their quickness and efficiency in learning the movements. As far as the physical aspect of movements is concerned, their ability was considerably higher than that of ordinary adults. It strengthed my conviction that the physical aspect of the movements is not as difficult as it is often believed to be, based mostly on remarks from people who may have seem them but not seriously practiced them. With some easier movements, like Six Positions, they were able to perform the complete movement with precision after watching me do it several times. Being convinced of their ability and enjoyment, I began to introduce a wide variety of movements. They included a dervish dance, a prayer, group movements like No. 16 and No. 32, a "multiplication" movement that involved a very long sequence, a ritual movement No. 11; and an exercise called Thirty Counts that required the exertion of the mind as well as of the body.
The children learned these movements with considerable ease. Lower teenagers were equal to or even better than older teenagers in their ability to manage difficult combinations of gestures. They seemed to be quite one with their body, and unlike adults, were able to take the given postures and gestures as they are, without mental arguments and conflicts with habits. Lower teenagers had some difficulty in mentally grasping the patterns and sequences in some movements, but soon mastered them helped by the presence of older teenagers in the front row.
Doing the multiplication was a little difficult because of a wide variation in heights. When the class was displacing backward, it was a sight to see how smaller children in the second row resisted fear as taller children in the first row seemed almost to swallow them. I noticed only one form of difficulty unique to these children; namely, the difficulty to resist the temptation to turn the head (to look) while displacing backward. This problem was rather unexpected because I knew that some children posessed perceptions that did not depend on their physical eyes. Later on, I became aware of the possibility that their training in external attention, such as the training in perceiving external objects with the eyes closed, may have produced some obsession about looking outside. I told Tatiyana that in some Eastern spiritual tradition one is trained in a very different kind of attention, through the practice of closing the eyes and not looking outside, or keeping the awareness of one's self, the void from which our attention comes from, even when our attention is flowing outward from our open eyes.
In spite of the children's ability in doing the movements, the possibilities for some types of learning were not accessible to most of them while they are generally accessible to adults through the practice of movements. It seemed to me that the way of our growth is so dialectical that the conditions which allow us to be in harmony with our essential nature may temporarily prevent us from growing beyond it. I noticed, that due mainly to the protection that they currently receive from their parents and community, most of the children were either not experiencing, or not encouraged to focus on and discuss about, many forms of doubts, conflicts and questionings intrinsic to the process of growth. This seemed to be the chief limitation with these children, not allowing them to cross a certain threshold in touching the depth of the movements in spite of their ability in performing them. To a certain extent, however, this limitation seemed natural for children and the protection they enjoy good for them at least in the meantime. I was reminded of Beelzebub's advise to Hassein: "my dear boy, try in the meantime not to think about these questions, which at your age it is still too early for you to think about. Everything in its proper time!" ("Beelzebub's Tales to His Grandson" p.78)
Gurdjieff mentions two contexts in which the practice of movements can have significance: development and search. As I recall, the program I offered to these children may have served some purpose in the first context and I am satisfied as such. On the other hand, the practice of movements in the second context seemed to be in a domain accessible only to a limited number of grown-up people about whom Gurdjieff described as follows:
"There are no definite degrees between children and adults. Length of life does not mean maturity. A man may live to a hundred and yet remain a child; he may grow tall and be a child all the time, if we mean by a "child" one who has no independent logic in his mind. A man can be called 'grown-up' only from the moment his mind has acquired this quality. So, from this point of view, it can be said that the Institute is only for grown-up people. Only a grown-up person can derive any benefit from it. A boy or a girl of eight can be grown-up, and a man of sixty can be a child." ("View from the Real World" p. 152)

Related links:
Osho Institute for Sacred Movement, Japan: more photos and video clips.

Third Millennium Center, Vladivostock: photos from public performance and comments from children


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Since 1997, Osho® Institute for Sacred Movements, Japan, has been offering Movements classes and workshops on regular basis.

The workshops and local group are led by Plavan N. Go, who was initiated to the ideas of Gurdjieff in 1984 through a Japanese translation project of the Beelzebub's Tales to His Grandson, studied the Movements since 1990.

Website: http://homepage3.nifty.com/MRG/english.htm
email: mister.go@nifty.ne.jp