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Hey Layman, I am a fan of your work and then today someone sent me this and I am loving it. I am a big Gurdjieff fan and am in the process of writing an emergent serial novel right now on Substack about Katherine Mansfield's last four months of life, which she spent at the Prieuré. The writing requires me to write Gurdjieff. There have been many scenes of the dance and movement practices, I wrote in the STOP exercise etc. I, myself, spent several years working closely with a Gurdjieff-inspired self-mastery instructor in NYC ... my experience with him is also part of the book. All of this to say...I get excited when a peer is also talking about Gurdjieff :) And I appreciate your incredible explanations. This part in particular: "It is not for the sake of some distant value but rather for a nourishing element that inheres within the intensity of the friction in which we are already embedded." YES. My time working closely with Gurdjieff and The Work was about 13 years ago. I hadn't thought much about him since...until recently and I have been diving back in. Re-reading In Search of the Miraculous and also Beelzebub's Tales. I am really enjoying the new perspective I have on where his work sit in the Western tradition. It feels to me like very early awareness of trauma integration. Somatics and embodiment, obviously. Anyway...thank you for all of this. If you'd like to see what I am up to...jump into the novel on my Substack. it's called Tenacious Magic. I release a chapter every Friday. We're at Chapter 13 now.

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Hey -- beautiful to hear from you. Thanks for putting your Substack in my mind. We should chat sometime...

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