DAILY LIFE

Awareness

Guild members seek to pay close attention to what is happening in both their inner and outer worlds as each day unfolds. Striving to cultivate a finer quality of attention, they acknowledge the diverse impulses that arise inside them. This can ultimately bring a greater sense of inner balance and relatedness with themselves, others and the world.

Practical Work

Work is a laboratory where guild members learn about the laws of nature, about their own desires and resistances, and about interacting with others. The challenge of working with crafts, farming and other natural processes can be a great help.

Working with Our Hands

When the mind and the body together find the corresponding rhythm of work, guild members feel closer to their sense of being alive and the purpose of their time here on earth. With their hands and body, they plant the seed in the soil, knead the bread in the kitchen and pull a pot from a mound of clay. When the mind is open and attentive, not interfering but rather quietly interacting with the intelligence of the hands and body, the heart awakens to a new understanding.

Living with Others

Guild members celebrate the joys and face the frictions and difficulties of daily life together. With the help of others, they become both a teacher and a student, listening with less judgment and seeing some of their own shortcomings. Through personal effort combined with mutual support, cooperation and trust, they continue to build a community that nurtures all through acts of service, love, encouragement and self discipline.

MEET GURU G. I GURDJIEFF

Mmbers of the Rochester Folk Art Guild follow the teachings from Greek-Armenian George Ivanovich Gurdjieff (pronounced GURD-jeef). He was an influential spiritual teacher, writer and musician of the first half of the 20th century.

He taught that human life as ordinarily lived is similar to sleep. He said transcendence of the sleeping state requires work, but when it is achieved, an individual can reach remarkable levels of vitality and awareness.

Gurdjieff’s legacy of writings, music and movements, or sacred dances, engage the intelligence of body, heart and mind and are studied at the Rochester Folk Art Guild.

According to RFAG master potter Annie Schliffer, making a beautiful pot requires that a person participate in a universal process of awakening the intelligence of the body and the hands. The same forces that shape a pot can also shape a person’s life, she said. As one attends to what one is doing in every moment, simple acts come to have inner meaning.

So it is that guild members all share in community tasks that include cooking, cleaning, gardening, care of animals, building maintenance and general upkeep. These daily chores, the discipline of the crafts, and the practice of music and movements provide opportunities to practice that “attention” and offer a model for transformation.

Gurdjieff’s message is one of hope, that there is the real possibility of evolution and discovering what it means to truly be a human being.