Gurdjieff International Review
M
y career as a registered nurse began in 1975, first with an associate degree and followed by a bachelor’s degree, a master’s degree in psychiatric nursing and eventually a doctorate in nursing education from Columbia University. The academic portions of my education engaged a span of twenty-five years, culminating in the opportunity to teach in a university as a tenured professor across all ages and degree levels within nursing education.
While these degrees and studies enabled me to teach and to write, my greatest teacher was Peggy Flinsch, who had experienced Mr. Gurdjieff directly and was a close pupil of Madame de Salzmann. Peggy nurtured in me the seeds of presence, intention and being in the world as a nurse. My son asked me once, “Mom, I noticed that whenever someone asks you what you do, you say ‘I am a nurse’ before you tell them anything about your role in academia.” I responded, “That is what I feel myself to be most deeply.”
I was a community health nurse in the fall of 1981 when I first encountered the Gurdjieff Work while working with a patient who was dying of lung cancer. When I walked into the home, I was met by this patient’s son who was involved in the Gurdjieff Work in Boston under the guidance of Doro Dooling (Peggy Flinsch’s sister). Upon his opening the door, I realized there was something very different energetically about this man. I was both interested and uncomfortable, as if I could not hide inside my personality. Over many visits to their home as a community health nurse, I became acutely aware of how very unusual his relationship with his mother was, how much he respected her individuality and her experience as a person. In addition, he had dropped a full life in Boston to provide whatever she needed for several months. The vibrancy of energy was palpable, but what was extraordinary to me was how he intentionally made room for how his mother saw things and what she might want and did not try to change her. His tone with her was sensitive to her autonomy as a person, intimate as a human being, and he demonstrated a willingness to serve her needs.
This attitude of deferring to the patient’s perspective is less common in medicine or nursing, as we are trained to solve problems and direct people towards what appears best for them, even if it is our subjective perception. Nurses are always expected to take care of additional things beyond the medical issue they are treating, and it is easy to lose sight of, or fail to acknowledge the patient’s preferences. This is especially true if the caregiver or nurse believes they already know what is needed in their efforts to remedy the situation. The attitude of openness and service that this patient’s son demonstrated towards his mother stood out.
During the months I spent visiting this patient, I came to know her son. He asked provocative questions about the meaning of life and even about the fineness of color gradation (his mother was a painter). He offered me several books which I read with great interest: The Psychology of Man’s Possible Evolution and In Search of the Miraculous. I felt as if a new world had opened to me. After a few months, he suggested that if I was truly interested, he could arrange for me to meet a teacher, Mrs. Margaret Flinsch, at her apartment in NYC. He made it sound very mysterious, but I could tell he was also teasing my interest. And yes, I went to meet her and that changed everything for me. She became my teacher for the next thirty years. During my visits and my Work with her, the question emerged: What is the Work in life in the context of being and nursing?
In January of 1982, Peggy Flinsch asked me to take care of two older ladies, Nancy Pearson and Margaret Capper (Miss Capper), who had spent years involved in the Work with Mr. and Madame Ouspensky in a rather grand house of Work known as Franklin Farms, located in Mendham, NJ.
At the point at which I came to know these women, one was in the process of dying and needed support for those last weeks of her life and the other was well into her nineties. It was January 1982. I was twenty-six and less than a year in the Work. I arrived in Mendham, NJ in a snowstorm, and retain a clear visual, physical and emotional memory of how my very light car twirled around three times when coming through the tolls. There was this moment of inner stop and a kind of choice; I chose to proceed. I had quit my job with two weeks’ notice; my teacher Peggy Flinsch had sent me; I believed my trip and mission to be guided by another, and I was ready to try.
In the town I was met by Pierce Wheeler and Anson Newton (then in their fifties), who showed me the way to the Turkey Cottage on Tempe Wick Road. This was on the grounds of Franklin Farms, opposite a huge barn with no animals, but with an old-fashioned phone on the wall; you had to get an operator to help you. A tiny bed up creaky stairs—an old sink with exposed pipes and oats they left in a pot overnight on an old stove. I have no memory of the bathroom, but it had to be there, exposed pipes and all. Salad in a blender, eat all the parts of the vegetables, even the tough ones (these ladies grew up through the depression). A mysterious world unfolded with the oldest, most wonderful books on the walls telling me secrets of a time in the Work that I had missed but felt so much a part of. I could see magnificent stallions outside in the pasture and terrace gardens created by past efforts of others, who were no longer physically alive. I would read; then look, imagine, and listen for the sounds of the Work when Mr. Ouspensky and others were there, the time when Gurdjieff had once been there for a visit. When I sat under a tree, I felt I could go to that earlier time and feel them from long ago. Imagination—but also vibrations. I met Tatiana Nagro, Mr. Ouspensky’s granddaughter, who had a house and horse farm on the property at that time. Tatiana had previously been married to Tom Forman, also an important teacher in the Work. She had the brightest, bluest eyes.
I took care of Nancy Pearson for these last three weeks of her life and she was very challenging to “like” but was given to my care and feeling for her in her struggles. An energy present of such vibration and stimulation that sleep was often impossible. Especially striking were the ways in which Nancy and Miss Capper exposed their personalities and individualities without apology. These expressions were difficult to not take personally and yet it became clear that one cannot help anyone while in reaction. I became acutely aware of my own inability to accept such challenging behaviors. I was not in charge of what they chose to do or not, even if I didn’t agree, and I was clearly not in charge of myself either. The lesson that began to emerge in me was the possibility of an inner witnessing of myself and the experience of hearing beyond words; to see as best I could, to stay focused inwardly in the midst of the patient’s expressed anger, fear, or even rejection, perhaps the most difficult emotional reaction for a nurse.
After three weeks Nancy passed. Then all the important people in the Work came to the house. Lord and Lady Pentland, Dr. and Mrs. Welch, Peggy, of course; and so many others. I had no idea what was needed. Mary Green told me I was earning my wings. She was always so matter of fact and funny too; she made me feel somehow able.
After Nancy died, I stayed with Miss Capper at the Turkey Cottage for several months and later secured an apartment in nearby Madison so that I could still visit Miss Capper regularly over most of that year. Miss Capper was the person who took care of Madame Ouspensky in the big house long before. She was ninety-three. She told me stories about the young Tom Forman and also about Mr. and Madame Ouspensky. The walls and the earth carried some atmosphere that I did not yet understand, but still I felt I was a part of it.
Nancy Pearson was buried high up on the hill in Hilltop Cemetery. The old chapel was stark white, and beautiful. Miss Capper passed later that year. Soon after, I made the personal decision to return to the Westchester/NYC areas. I told Peggy that I had to go home and find my life, that I had gone without understanding anything and because she had asked me, but that I hoped if I ever again went on such an expedition, I could know what I was choosing and face it with consciousness, to be able to understand why. I moved back to my folks in White Plains and then off on my own again in NYC. Yet, everything that came after was influenced in some way by this earlier time.
Now (2025) seems a time in life when there appears to be a chance to repeat some things with consciousness. There is a familiarity with the choices, the feelings, the moments in relation to how I am, with my own sensitivities and perhaps a taste on occasion for why I am here. It is not so much repeating as facing together the young woman and the gradually more awakened woman, all in the same body: to be willing to see and be seen, something just a tiny step outside of time.
Since the time of my early residence at Franklin Farms, there have been many nursing experiences in which I have felt touched by the influences of the Work and even earlier events that evoked questions that kept my search alive. These experiences appear to be preserved as conscious impressions of human relationships where a depth of understanding is palpable but often wordless.
Even before I had actually become directly involved in the Work, I cared very much about being a “good” nurse. This is an impression of myself that I often share with my students, even today. As a very new nurse at twenty years of age I recall when I yelled at a patient, criticizing her behavior. The patient was old and had some psychological issues, as well as an extreme sense of entitlement. She angrily criticized one of the new nurses who was especially sweet and kind but did not defend herself and was visibly upset. A different patient criticized me having heard my tone of voice with this other patient, saying a nurse should never speak to a patient like that. She did not want to hear my explanation, and I felt both wrongly accused and rightly criticized. It was such an uncomfortable feeling about myself, evoking conscience and self-questioning for which I did not have an answer, but it always stayed with me. The Work has given me an appreciation of the awareness of such moments of seeing, and helped me to value a larger perspective on the multiple effects of one’s behavior.
There are memories of times with both patients and students when there was a sense that the human relation may be infused with the higher and that the nature of practice with another requires an opening. In one such encounter I visited a ninety-five-year-old concentration camp survivor, who gave me the felt understanding of what it was like to live so long that one realizes they are alone, as at such an advanced age, everyone else she knew had died. I had imagined how wonderful to live so long. I realized I had no idea what it was like to be her. I was shocked by my imagination and grateful to be given this feeling impression.
Once I tried the act of sensing one’s hands and the emerging sense of presence in the body while taking a BP. The impression of the slightly bent-over posture and open sensitivity of this elderly man remains vivid in my memory, his posture, skin color, eyes and sensitivity.
Another time I made a simple first home visit to a new patient and to his wife and found the patient was in the final moments of dying of a terminal illness, and so I just stayed with them, and we witnessed and cared together. We did not call for an ambulance until he passed. I just remember “knowing” this was what was needed, and I felt the miracle of finding myself placed where all that was needed was to care and be present.
Years later, as a clinical teacher, I took a student out on a Community Nursing visit. This could have been a routine visit to measure vital signs and assess the patient; however, it is the sense of being present and developing a relationship with another human being that I wanted the student to feel. My intention was to demonstrate the importance of the human connection in tone, movement and feeling, while also engaging with accurate assessment skills. I did not realize it at first, but the student noticed my approach with the patient: the care and touch, voice, movement and eye contact, and perhaps something else. She told me how different my way was with this patient from what she had imagined. Her declaration helped me to see that she valued what she saw and felt. Both the student and the patient helped me to recognize something that had become natural to me but could still be transmitted to another.
In my current academic role, I teach students pursuing the M.S. and Ph.D. in Nursing. I try to help them to find a way to study something in nursing practice or education that matters to them. We share intimate stories of loss, ethical conflicts, and nursing issues encountered. I encourage them to question and carry an interest in discovery. What I bring to them through a three-centered practice is something that they respond to: often it evokes discussion of spiritual practices in their own lives. I see that there is a thirst for the incorporation of that within their education. I hope that how I am with them–emotionally, intellectually, and physically–will enable them as future educators or administrators to offer compassion and respect to others. □
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