Rudolf Steiner's six monthly disciplines in thought, will, equanimity, positivity, open-mindedness, and inner harmony, given as the moral ground without which any higher meditation goes astray.
The Six Subsidiary Exercises are Rudolf Steiner's preliminary training in soul character, given as the indispensable ground for anthroposophical meditation. Practiced one per month and then circulated in unbroken cycle, they work the six soul qualities of thought-control, will-control, equanimity of feeling, positivity, open-mindedness, and harmony of the previous five into the meditant's daily life before any higher-cognition work begins.
In Steiner's Own Words
General requirements that everyone who wants to undergo occult development must impose on themselves (so-called preliminary or subsidiary exercises): The following describes the conditions that must underlie occult development. No one should think that they can make progress through any measures of external or internal life if they do not fulfill these conditions. All meditation, concentration, and other exercises will be worthless, and in a certain sense even harmful, if life is not regulated in accordance with these conditions. One cannot give people powers; one can only bring out those that already lie within them. They do not develop by themselves because there are external and internal obstacles to them.
What it Means Today
Steiner places these six exercises before every other meditative instruction he ever gave. Read in sequence, they are a school of the heart. The first exercise asks the student to hold a chosen thought (a pin, a pencil, anything banal) at the centre of attention for five minutes daily, building thought-control. The second cultivates will by adding a small unprompted action, performed at the same time each day. The third works equanimity in feeling, refusing to be either elated by joy or crushed by sorrow. The fourth, positivity, learns to find the hidden good in every appearance, the way Christ saw the beautiful teeth in the dog's corpse. The fifth, open-mindedness, keeps a back door open for any new experience the world might bring. The sixth weaves the previous five into a single harmonious rhythm.
The Waldorf inner-teacher tradition working since 1919 takes these six as the daily character work of every classroom teacher, on the principle that the soul-quality of the educator is the curriculum the child actually receives. Anthroposophic meditants follow the same monthly cycle. The exercises do nothing dramatic, which is precisely the point. They build the rhythmic, balanced soul-vessel without which higher imagination, inspiration, and intuition can damage rather than serve the practitioner. They are practical, repeatable, and almost invisible to any onlooker. Yet Steiner is unambiguous: without them, every other inner exercise is worthless or worse. A core companion practice to the Six Subsidiary Exercises is the evening Backwards Review (Rückschau): holding the day's events in reverse order to strengthen the etheric body. Beyond the Six Subsidiary Exercises, Steiner names Inner Calm (Innere Ruhe) as a foundational training-precondition: five minutes of daily withdrawal into a higher-self vantage. The Six Subsidiary Exercises form the cognitive bedrock; the moral-soul preparation that surrounds them is the Eight-Membered Path (Steiner's reading of Buddha's Noble Eightfold Path).
Where to Read More
- Soul Exercises I: Word and Symbol Meditations, GA 267
- Guidance in Esoteric Training, GA 245, the dedicated compilation
- An Outline of Occult Science, GA 13, chapter on cognition of higher worlds
- Buy Start Now: A Book of Soul and Spiritual Exercises from SteinerBooks
- Steiner's Six Exercises: The 2,400-Day Path to Spiritual ...