Gurdjieff gave inner exercises of different types at the various stages of his teaching work. These practices are distinct from themes and general work of self-observation and self-remembering. The exercises are practiced in various conditions including together with a group, on one’s own in the midst of the activities of life, and alone in contemplative conditions. 

Many of the exercises Gurdjieff gave were transmitted by students in the years following Gurdjieff’s death. Some students (who became teachers) received and/or preferred certain of Gurdjieff’s exercises. In some cases students developed new exercises based on their interpretation of what Gurdjieff showed. 

JG Bennett developed a large repertoire of what he called “morning exercises” for daily sitting practice. Some of these resemble what Gurdjieff showed and some are completely new inventions and represent a divergence from Gurdjieff’s teaching in their emphasis on specialization. To further the difficulty, most of those passing on Mr. Bennett’s exercises didn’t have an opportunity to develop the depth of understanding because they worked with him for less than a year before going on to teach others. 

Meanwhile, Jeanne de Salzmann became enamored with Zen Buddhism and guided the work of the international Gurdjieff Foundations away from Gurdjieff’s mode of practice and in the direction of eastern meditation. 

The work of first-generation teachers is invaluable but the teaching almost immediately went in a new direction under their guidance. 

The most basic element of Gurdjieff’s exercises is what he called Collected State. This is a state that emerges gradually with work on a balanced presence in the three media of the inner life – sensation, feeling, and thought. It is a state that could be called “normal” for a human being, but requires a long period of effort for us whose inner lives have been disorganized in the conditions of contemporary life. Collected State is the basis of all further development. 

In the final years of his teaching Gurdjieff organized his inner exercises into a rounded program of practices meant to develop along three distinct lines – work on ourselves, work with a group, and work in service of  the Work. 

In giving these 88 new exercises in the mid-1940s Gurdjieff commented that “In these groups, at this time, I vividly inscribed the Third Series of my works". This is a reference to his intention for the Third Series of his writings, the purpose of which was “to assist the arising, in the mentation and in the feelings of the reader, of a veritable, non-fantastic representation not of that illusory world which he now perceives, but of the world existing in reality.”

Many students of his work have commented that Gurdjieff’s third book, Life is Real Only Then, When I AM appears to be incomplete. The book is meant to provide practical indications and methods for how to work in such a way as to fulfill the promise of realizing the possibilities inherent in a human being. But the book is incomplete, and as Gurdjieff said, the 88 exercises are meant to provide comprehensive guidance for crystallizing higher being bodies. 

The 88 exercises are the unwritten “book” meant to be read by each in his or her own being in the process of putting Gurdjieff’s precise indications into practice. Gurdjieff’s inner exercises are a book written not in words but in the language of Understanding. 

Harmonious Development maintains a strong focus on the clear and precise practices given by Gurdjieff himself. We work with Gurdjieff’s practices in every context including group meetings, sittings, Movements classes, readings, and practical work sessions.