Our work with inner tasks is about our relationship with attention. It is the ‘mindfulness practice’ of our Wisdom lineage, our connecting with conscious attention, our invitation to see our conditioning and release it into greater awareness. It is part of our Wisdom School rhythm, from the teachings of G.I. Gurdjieff. Inner tasks are intended to collect our community together around some simple prompts so that you might weave these practices into your daily lives as part of your intention to be present in your life. We invite you to notice that attention doesn’t need to grow, it is already there, something in you that you are invited to notice, connect with and be touched by.
Because our inner work can get too cognitive, our inner tasks are geared for our moving center and are therefore based in sensation, and the way energy flows and is blocked in our bodies. So, throughout our time together, we want to invite you to develop and deepen your noticing of sensation in your body. You might even begin growing your personal lexicon of sensation words like dense, fluid, tremulous, fluttery, buzzy, constricted, vibrant. Play with it, be curious and creative.
Make it your intention to come back to your body and notice what is happening in sensation. Note the sensations in your body without judgement. In fact, thank the part of you that helped you remember the inner task.
For our months together, we will be following some basic inner tasks that Heather Ruce has compiled and is offering on the Wisdom School Community Facebook page. These are tasks typically given in Wisdom Schools before we have a period of conscious or mindful physical work.
Our inner task this month is ‘finding your feet’. Find your feet on the ground and bring your attention to the sensation in them. See if you can sense more than visualize the connection to the earth all the way down to the core. Work with being here now, being in your body, being ‘incarnated’.
This is the first in a monthly series of Inner Tasks accompanying the work in The Wisdom Jesus Book Circle. This post was given to work with during the month between January 26 and February 23, 2021. Feel free to join us, and check out the home page blog posts for the Book Circle. And stay tuned for the next Inner Task post!
Images from the top: Barefoot Walking, courtesy of author Clint McKoy, Unsplash; Poor Man’s Garden, image courtesy of author Gabriel Jimenez, Unsplash.
Resource offered by Heather Ruce.
Wisdom Jesus Book Circle
A monthly series of resources from the friends and leaders of the Wisdom Waypoints Book Circle Series on: The Wisdom Jesus: Transforming Heart and Mind—A New Perspective on Christ and His message by Cynthia Bourgeault.