As a young man, George Ivanovitch Gurdjieff (1866 - 1949) visited various monasteries and esoteric schools in Central Asia, the Hindu Kush and Egypt, where he believed the seeds of real knowledge of transformation could be found. It was there that he also found the sacred dances that people would later call The Movements, which he brought to the West.

He assembled his Teaching and started small groups in his native Russia, but the Revolution forced him to leave Russia. He finally settled in France and taught there until his death in 1949.

Gurdjieff felt that nature has taken our lower nature as far as it could, and that if a person wishes to complete his or her Being – to live in two worlds between the Higher nature and the lower nature – this can only happen if he or she works on transforming the lower nature so that a contact can be made with the Higher Self. The Gurdjieff Tradition contains a richness of ideas that make it possible for a person with a serious wish to accomplish this.

Gurdjieff believed that the Teaching needed to be lived, and that a man or woman alone could do nothing – that there needed to be groups as a necessary first help in a person's search for Being. Since his death, Gurdjieff groups have spread all over the world.