Gurdjieff International Review

n March 20, 2020, in response to the COVID-19 pandemic, a memo from the Gurdjieff Foundation of New York announced that the Foundation would close until the end of April. The closure was gradually extended until September 2021. All around the world, each foundation had to make its own decision about whether and when to reopen, and how. The policies for the Gurdjieff Foundation of New York resulted from extensive consultation with the Doctors Team.

The Doctors Team met regularly during the pandemic. It was not an easy request. In the midst of taking care of patients, our own health (some of us became very ill from the virus), caring for children out of school and for parents who were ill, we said “yes” to helping our bigger community, guiding the New York Foundation in expressing an appropriate response to the pandemic that was specific to our community. Among us were some of the most knowledgeable scientists in NYC. We were also group leaders, Movements teachers, and friends. And we were people who did not turn away from being deeply in question.

As we exchanged at our meetings, what opened was our relationship to the question. We reflected on what we were being asked to do. Dr. Goa, from the Foundation leadership, approached us to ensure that, first of all, no one would die from contact with the virus during work activities. This reminded me of a time when Paul Reynard had supported me: I was likely to die of leukemia and complained that I felt too weak to work, but Paul reminded me to fight for my life because, “Well, what else is there?”

I wondered what, as a pediatrician, I could offer and whether I would be heard. I was concerned about parents who would come to activities in NYC and put their young children at risk. So little was known about the risk to children. I had taken epidemiology courses in medical school and could offer ways to track spread. However, ours was not just any community: as in most spiritual practices, the discipline of being on time, making a commitment to come every week was part of the magic and effectiveness of practice. Would members weigh this against their individual health risks? We are often asked to do more than we think we can. So, what is appropriate self-care is often mysterious and in question for many of us. I often struggle with who in me is saying yes, who is saying no.

I looked back on what had brought me into the Work and led me to become a doctor twelve years later. Like many who search for a spiritual practice early in life, I had a difficult childhood to thank. I had learning disabilities and expressive speech delay which made fitting in a challenge. I saw the life of the world in the vibrancy of nature, which was difficult or impossible for me to communicate in words. I also struggled with reading and writing but was able to read music and play the piano. When I met my first Gurdjieff teacher in Boulder, Colorado in 1970, I felt that I had at last met someone from my original planet. She understood how I saw the connectivity of higher forces and that most people were unaware of that possibility. I went to St. Elmo, the San Francisco Foundation, to learn to play piano for the Movements and met Lord Pentland. He was very interested in young people and the attitudes that the 1960s may have contributed to a disillusionment in traditional careers and education. He also emphasized that being in the Work was not sufficient for a full life. He suggested that I go to college and become a physician. He was a master of planting seeds that might blossom years later. I know that there are others in my generation who received similar advice from Lord Pentland. I was never a good student, but years of reading All and Everything[1] with focus and openness to the many strange words Gurdjieff created actually taught me to read with great retention. When I was thirty, Lord Pentland’s words came back to me, and I went to college. My premed record earned me a large group interview at Yale Medical School, where I bonded with the interviewer over music. “We need a harpist!” he said. And I got in.

But then what does it mean to live a responsible full life? Gurdjieff’s teachings serve as a reminder that responsibility is not to be taken lightly because it shapes not only our lives, but also the world around us. To bring this back to the Doctors Team, we struggled with designing a protocol as you would for a hospital or university. We wondered what was needed for a more whole response to a situation that lacked clarity. We needed the intelligence of both mind and feeling. We needed the intelligence of the body.

Were we saving the life of physical bodies, and the life of a vibrant community, and the life of Inner work? How should we as physicians, in the sense that Gurdjieff says a priest should study medicine and a doctor should study the soul, approach our members? What about the health of the psyche? To just keep people away isolates the most vulnerable. How does our conscience contribute to our advice as the Doctors Team?

Years ago, when I was “Camp Doctor” for an international conference, a young man from Chicago became overwhelmed and suicidal. I complained to Paul Reynard that I was missing the conference sitting in the infirmary with this young man. Paul gave me a look I will never forget and said, “Why don’t you just try being a kind human being.” It is now my deepest aspiration.

Paul’s response was a shock to wake up because I trusted him to be doing for me what he was asking me to do for another. Just wholeheartedly helping someone else both gets you out of your egocentric self and into what I thought I was aiming at: connectivity to something bigger. As the Doctors Team, was there a way to include this in our intellectual pursuit? As a group, we intuited that the answer could not come from the head only or from any one of us.

My practice as a pediatrician had helped me to love humanness and humanity. Children are perhaps easier to love unconditionally, so they were, and still are a natural entry point for me to embrace humanity.

I turned the corner on the Doctors Team in a more whole way when I saw the Foundation as family. Could we treat the members as precious children, could we treat the elders who were at such high risk as beloved grandparents? According to the great Japanese Buddhist teacher Eihei Dōgen, a student of Dharma cannot progress beyond their intellect until they develop rōbai shin, which is sometimes translated as grandmotherly love. It represents a wisdom that bypasses individual ability and intelligence, opening the heart to a greater universal love for all humanity. I find it interesting that he wrote this in his “Instructions to the Cook” emphasizing the responsibility of the tenzo or head cook, which is much the same as the responsibility of a physician.[2] Recipes can be compared to medicine, and both can be seen as serving the body and soul. It seems to me that Dōgen and Gurdjieff emphasized the importance of conscious preparation in both cooking and healing.

As we met week after week, the weight of our responsibility changed. I struggled to express my two natures with warmth as we often approach our lives in the Work: not mixing the narrative of our daily life with our inner effort, not wanting our stories to take us. As doctors, however, we often crossed that line when we had the honor of being with peers and group leaders in an intimate way during their aging, illness, and death. We saw their humanness and how it brought humanity and warmth to their Work. For example, during the last weeks of Paul’s life I spent time with him in the hospital. Partly this was because I was a physician, and partly because we had known each other for so long and through my own illness. We were waiting for transportation to take him to the CT scan, and it was taking a long time, so I said, “I can do this” and pushed his bed through the hallways. Every time we came to the double doors requiring a button to open them, he stated with great authority, in his baritone voice (and by then he was rarely talking and mostly in French), “Open the doors! Open the doors!” I didn’t know if he was being playful, but it was both fun and deeply meaningful, as this was what he told my group at our last meeting, “You have the resources. Just open the door.”

Personally, I did some really humble and sincere reflection during the isolation of the pandemic. I came to admit that after forty-five years, my feeling was not deeply touched by my best efforts. I did not embody my practice. I felt heart broken and didn’t know if I was willing to start again, a blank slate. The beauty of the pandemic was that everything was online. Experiencing different practices and teachers anywhere in the world was possible. And after decades of studying myself, I knew that I appreciated the support of a teacher. I didn’t blossom in peer groups. I also found meditating alone at home day after day dismal and knew I had a nature that needed the support of my community sitting together. Work weeks were the highlight of my year, and I also wondered what an extended period of monastic life would open for me. I took refuge at the San Francisco Zen Center and discovered that my heart was not broken; just a little frozen.

Perhaps I misunderstood what was brought by Mr. Gurdjieff and Madame de Salzmann. It certainly is in the literature. Mme says, “When I begin to see, I begin to love what I see.”[3] I focused on the first phrase and spent many years seeing and knowing myself, which is necessary and wonderful. But I didn’t come to loving “what is” in a meaningful way. That’s what Buddhism has helped me connect with most. I practice Mahāyāna Soto Zen where we take a vow to save all beings. It’s of course an impossible vow but opened me to compassion for all my many I’s, known and unknown. I struggle with this commitment to the higher which requires wholehearted love for the present moment, whatever it is. I see myself more deeply in this vow. It’s a continuous wonderful adventure, as were my many years in the Work.

Gurdjieff described physicians in All and Everything as, “those responsible individuals who voluntarily devote the whole of their existence to helping any being of that region to fulfill his being-obligations.”[4]

What are our being-obligations? Can I risk treating fellow humans, both Foundation members and others, as members of my family? Because the warmth I feel for my humanness and the humanity of others gives me clarity to act appropriately. I spent decades seeing myself and seeking, searching for a connection which is already there. Mme de Salzmann speaks of “a new feeling.”[5] Perhaps this is love for our human condition that connects us all. So, when we are asked to come together in the unknown, about those we deeply care for, what arises? In Buddhism we speak of a bird who flies with two wings: one of wisdom and one of compassion. On the Doctors Team I glimpsed this possibility. □

Dr. Amy Griffin is a pediatrician and longtime member of the Gurdjieff Foundation of New York, where for years she was an active member of the Doctors Team. Several years ago, she moved into a Soto Zen community in Northern California.