Impactful Elements of a Fourthway Retreat

With registration for our weeklong summer retreat now open, I've been thinking about the hundreds of retreats I've led and what made them truly powerful. The unique qualities of a Fourthway retreat strive to offer folks a way to learn presence while engaging in life. This is more challenging than retreats where silence and meditation are imposed because one has to make the choice to become silent.

On our weeklong summer retreats, we meditate in the morning with short intervals of silence called “stops” during the day, zikr in the evening, but most of our time is spent doing everyday activities…under special circumstances. There is a container in which we participate; each person aiming to be present while doing activities like cooking, building, or gardening.

There is an atmosphere that develops amongst the participants that is conducive to increasing Presence. Those who are accustomed to maintaining presence help others just by doing it. It’s almost like a contagion.

The energies influencing our experience intensify as this contagion takes hold.

By midweek, we are operating under extraordinary circumstances that accelerate transformation. We find ourselves able to do what we might have considered impossible. We enter states of Being that are difficult to reach in ordinary life, where the energies deplete us rather than contribute to this possibility.

Besides this way of increasing Presence, the other most unique and powerful element of these retreats is the Gurdjieff Movements, of which I have written many articles. One has to experience them to truly understand their mysterious magic. They are a part of our practice to intensify attention, awareness, and presence.

They are a portal into another realm; one where we are taken out of our conditioned behavior and responses, if we can give way to their influences.

Here is an excerpt from my article: Key Aspects Regarding the Gurdjieff Movements

“There are three key aspects to doing the movements.

Firstly, there is no place to hide in the Movements as we can in life, so it can be irritating and evoke feelings of inadequacy if one falls prey to those reactions. It is not about being a better dancer or coordinating our bodies. The Movements make our conditioning more evident, whereas in life, that conditioning keeps us coping, functioning mechanically, and not thriving. 

Movements become almost impossible when we are filled with emotional reaction, whether that's to the situation, our inabilities, our own mistakes, and imperfection, or how we appear in the class. Some people may not realize they are having that much reaction, and think that it is just their inability to follow the sequence. The reactions are keeping them from following the sequence.

We are so habitually used to swimming in reaction in life that we cannot see that that is the actual hindrance to our ability to execute the sequence. 

To see this in oneself in the present moment in a Movements class is Divine Grace. 

In this way, the Movements reveal much to us. We continue to make the efforts until suddenly we can do them. We take ourselves less seriously. We calm down and coordinate systems. The dance can then become the prayer that it is.

Secondly, the Movements engage our will. We must decide to make the right kind of effort and be willing to see what is before us. I have watched many people with skilled moving centers unable to function well in a class because they are not willing to make a different kind of effort than they are accustomed to. The movements’ asymmetrical patterns demand a relaxed and vigilant attention, even if the body has picked up the pattern.

Thirdly, the Movements are difficult in that they demand precision and exactitude. This comes from a certain standard within us. Through precision, one can streamline a movement and their heart then opens to the energy of that Movement. The connection to unfamiliar gestures, the ritualistic nature of the dance, together with the beautiful music, liberates us. Our desire, effort, and surrender usher in a deeper experience that far surpasses just getting the dance right.” 

If this is intriguing to you and calls you to face your habitual inner landscape, please join us this summer. The live music is extremely beautiful and the Movements take us to another dimension where your heart can open. We welcome you.

For more about Molly’s experience with the Movements, read her blog The Power of the Gurdjieff Movements.

For information about our Fourthway retreats, click here: Summer Retreat.