#61 You Are Not Your Thoughts: The Fourth Way With Stuart Goodnick & Robert Schmidt

Most of us don’t realize how identified we are with the voice in our heads — until we start paying attention.

In this episode of The Intuition Incubator, I sit down with Rob Schmidt and Stuart Goodnick, longtime Fourth Way practitioners and co-founders of the Tai-Yu Meditation Center, to talk about what it actually means to wake up from automatic living. We explore self-observation, presence, and the subtle ways the mind keeps us reacting instead of choosing.

This conversation moves into how projection shapes our relationships, why real listening is rare, and how conversation itself can become a spiritual practice. Rob and Stuart share decades of lived experience from the Fourth Way tradition of Gurdjieff, offering insight into intuition, executive presence, and what becomes possible when we stop believing every thought we have.

Rob Schmidt and Stuart Goodnick are spiritual teachers with Tayu Meditation Center, co-hosts of The Mystical Positivist podcast, and co-founders of Many Rivers Books & Tea. Tayu Meditation Center, based in Sebastopol, CA, was founded in 1976 by Robert Daniel Ennis. Grounded in the Fourth Way tradition of G.I. Gurdjieff, Tayu practice emphasises conversation be it within ourselves, with others, and between spiritual traditions.

Chapters:

00:00 Introduction to Tai-Yu Meditation and Co-Meditation

06:17 Understanding the Fourth Way Tradition

11:48 The Challenge of Self-Observation and Self-Remembering

16:44 The Role of Conscious Suffering in Personal Growth

22:00 Identifications and Their Impact on Relationships

33:37 The Purpose of Self-Observation

39:19 Identifications and Their Impact

41:11 The Practice of Co-Meditation

43:58 Presence in Communication

48:37 Intuition and Its Development

52:03 Finding Meaning in Life

58:09 You Are Not Your Thoughts

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