Fabiola  Govare

"Seeing does not come from thinking. It comes from the shock at the moment when, feeling an urgency to know what is true, I suddenly realize my thinking mind cannot perceive reality. To understand what I really am at this moment, I need sincerity and humility, and an unmasked exposure that I do not know. This would mean to refuse nothing, exclude nothing and enter the experience of discovering what I think, what I sense, what I wish, all at this very moment."

Jeanne de Salzmann, The Reality of Being

Jeanne De Salzmann was born in 1889 in Reims, France and raised in Geneva, Switzerland. She married Alexandre de Salzmann, a well-known Russian painter, in 1912 and returned to his home in Tiflis in the Caucasus mountain region of southern Russia. She met Gurdjieff in 1919 in Tiflis, became committed to his work, and remained close to him until his death in Paris thirty years later.

Before he died Gurdjieff charged Mme.de Salzmann to live to be "over 100" in order to establish his teaching. He left her all his rights with respect to his writings and dance exercises called the "Movements."

During the next forty years she arranged for publication of his books and preservation of the Movements, and established Gurdjieff centers to practice the teaching in Paris, New York, and London, as well as Caracas, Venezuela.

Mme. de Salzmann died at the age of 101 in Paris in 1990.