Tag Archives: 5 rhythms

Deepening awareness of embodiment

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This past Saturday, I provided the “ofrenda” at the monthly gathering of women dancing the 5 Rhythms (Step Into Yes) in Austin, facilitated by Lisa DeLand (dancingfirelizards.com).

Lisa and I are old friends. We met at Sweat Your Prayers, an ecstatic dance, in 1995. We have similar paths of recovery from adverse childhood experiences, and now, having worked a lot with our selves, by ourselves and with the help of others, we are in the primes of our lives in terms of creating and offering paths to wholeness and wellness for those in search.

Our paths have some overlap. We both are acquainted with the vast amount of suffering in the world, including our own, and feel moved to offer paths that liberate us and those we work with from conditioning that limits us.

My ofrenda was called Bringing Us Home To Our Existence, and I had 20 minutes between waves of dancing to teach the 28 or so women present about their inner rhythms: breath, heartbeat, and tide.

Background: In late 2022, I began posting on Instagram daily — for 100 days — my experience of what I was then calling Biodynamic Meditation. I’d actually begun practicing it many years previously, in 2013, after I took my first class in Craniosacral Biodynamics and wanted to explore how the concepts of the breath of life, primary respiration, potency, and the tides actually manifested in my own embodied existence.

I sat and sat and noticed more and more. It helped to have some direction from my training, and I could go to my teacher, describe my experience, and have him verify whether I was on track.

That’s one way of learning.

I had planned to start teaching Biodynamic Meditation in 2023, and then I learned I was going to have to move from my home of 12 years, which disrupted my plans.

The move is complete. My foundation training in Craniosacral Biodynamics (and certification) is complete. I’m spending this year learning how best to teach Biodynamic Meditation, and I dipped into in-person teaching of a large group for the first time on Saturday. It was too brief, but they got a taste of it. My take is that some people (who all gathered primarily to dance) were not deeply interested, and others came up afterward and thanked me.

I’m now considering calling it meditation for self-healing, meditation for healing, meditation for health, or simply, how to make friends with your body.

If this is a topic you are interested in, I’d love to hear from you! I’m open to working with individuals, small groups, in person, and online.

Bounce-dancing on a rebounder in intervals after eating is fun!

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Factor #1: My friend Katie and I had dinner at a Mediterranean buffet restaurant recently, and she suggested we walk right after eating, citing studies saying that walking for a few minutes immediately after a meal stabilizes insulin.

I looked it up (you know me!), and it has a lot of other benefits. It boosts metabolism, speeds digestion, reduces bloating, increases endorphins and serotonin, promotes better sleep, helps regulate appetite, improves learning and memory, increases circulation for better delivery of nutrients, etc.

Plus, walking with a friend is sweet. You get to catch up with each other and get some sun and fresh air and move. I especially love to go for scenic walks with my friends.

Factor #2: I love ecstatic dancing! It’s free-form movement to music. Dancing the 5 rhythms has been a fairly regular practice since 1995. I love the creative aspects of dance, letting my body move how it wants to move, exploring new movements, getting more familiar with my body, and becoming one with the music.

It’s a fun practice for self-expression and discovery, with health benefits.

Factor #3: I recently bought a rebounder so I can use it at home when the weather is bad or I don’t want to leave. (I’ve become a homebody.)

Rebounding is great for the lymphatic system, which cleans up metabolic waste and toxins in the body, improving immunity, and I’m all in favor of that! It has other benefits, too. Bouncing works the feet, calves, and hips (if you raise your knees), you can add in upper-body movements, and it is good cardiovascular exercise.

So…putting those three factors together, after I eat, I put on some music. It’s important to get the BPM right. I’ve found a couple of tunes that are 45 and 49 BPM. Not too fast, nor too slow, but perfect for bouncing.

Then I start bounce-dancing! I bounce with vigor for a minute, getting out of breath, exploring various ways to bounce (jumping, running, hopping, crossing one foot in front of the other alternatively, doing knee raises, adding kicks, scissoring, etc.).

Then I slow way down for a minute, minimally bouncing, maybe doing some upper body twists, letting my heart rate slow.

I alternative the vigorous and the slow phases, doing a minute of each, for however long the song lasts. It’s also a pleasure to discover new music for bounce-dancing! 10 minutes and experiment with the shortening the length of the slow intervals.

The beauty of bounce-dancing is it’s fun and it’s healthy in many ways. I’ve just been doing it for a few days as I remember to do it, and what I notice most is that I sleep better and have more energy.

Also, I love having strong feet and legs!

Just coincidentally, the New York Times just published an article on rebounding, aka trampolining, Bouncing Your Way to Better Health.

10 years after she died, a tribute to Gabrielle Roth

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One of my practices is ecstatic dance. I discovered it in 1995 in Austin, and it became part of my life. Gabrielle was my primary teacher, through teachers she trained and also in person.

Gabrielle was, well, not the inventor of ecstatic dance, since I’m pretty sure it was happening the moment humans began creating rhythm, perhaps even before then in response to nature’s rhythms, shapes, sounds.

She named these rhythms and sequenced them: flowing, staccato, chaos, lyrical, stillness. A wave.

If you’re not familiar with it, ecstatic dance is not performative. It is about connecting with your own body, moving from the inside out. We dance like nobody is watching.

I have danced with several of the people in this video: Kathy, Lori, Andrea, Vincent, Ya’acov, Jo, Michael, Amara, and I met Robert.

Watch Gabrielle move at the end.

and then I met Gabrielle | memories of Gabrielle Roth, 1941-2012

Most of my ecstatic dancing has been here in Austin, which offers many choices now, though we started as Sweat Your Prayers, dancing the 5 rhythms.

I’ve danced in Dallas, Santa Fe, Taos, Mill Valley, Santa Cruz, Maui, London, Montreal, and DC.

My primary teachers have been Claire Alexander, Lisa DeLand, and Oscar Madera.

Ecstatic dance helped me get into my body and move in an authentic and pleasurable way, challenging myself to find all the movements, developing finer coordination and balance, being able to hold my space in a room full of dancers, connecting, becoming part of a community.

Over these many years through this practice, I developed an auditory-kinesthetic synesthesia, in which sound and movement are one. It gives me a lot of satisfaction to tune into my body and let what wants to move, move.

Dancers enjoy the fun of dancing. It’s not intellectual. It’s not serious. We are present and full of vitality, aware and responsive. We show up with who we are. We communicate nonverbally, inviting another to move with us, or moving into our own solo dance, with eye contact (or lack of it), using prayer hands, touch (with consent), bows, moving toward or away, expressing with body language.

We tend to hug a lot, and we’re pretty good at it.

I’m so grateful to have found ecstatic dance and to have practiced it for nearly 30 years. I believe it’s helping to keep me young, and the older I get, the younger I get!

👣💚🙏🏽

For more of Gabrielle herself, she spoke at length at the Breath of Life Conference in London in 2009, to practitioners of another one of my practices, Craniosacral Biodynamics.

Here’s the video.

Dancing in Santa Fe

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I went to a 5 Rhythms movement lab in Santa Fe, where I am on vacation, the other night. Chloe Goodwin facilitated. The space was extraordinarily beautiful, the music inspiring, and I quickly saw a range of more and less experienced dancers among the 20 or so people present.

It felt so great to be back in a dance studio. I’m accustomed to dancing once or twice (very occasionally, 3 or 4 times) a week in Austin, but it wasn’t available in Taos that I could find when I was there last week. I’ve been driving a lot. My body felt sluggish and stiff. Yoga classes have been helpful and also a nice way to meet people who share this interest when traveling, but even more than yoga, ecstatic dance in a studio allows me the freedom to let my body show me how it wants and needs to move to restore well-being.

So we danced freely in the space for a while. I felt shy at first, not knowing anyone (they all knew each other), so I just paid attention to what my body wanted. So good. Then I shyly began to make eye contact with a few people and danced with various partners.

Chloe introduced experiences of body parts: hands, elbows, knees, feet, hips, head, and more. Yes. I’m sure she was watching and seeing how people unconsciously restrict themselves. Yes, your head is a body part, and it can dance too, and it’s really good for your circulation and neck flexibility to move it. Instead of focusing your eyes, use your peripheral vision.

Then Chloe pointed out the blue masking tape on the floor, which created four spaces for dancing, which she described thusly: the outer edges of the room were reserved for people who just wanted to do their own dance by themselves. Coming in toward the center a bit was a space for dancing with a partner. The inner circle was for dancing in community, and the X in the center was for surveying, and dancing with, the entire room.

I danced in all the spaces. I love dancing alone, sometimes with my eyes closed to intensify my auditory/kinesthetic synesthesia and to be one with the music/my body/the space around me. I don’t care what it looks like. There’s a joy and freedom there for me that I recognize may be alien to others.

I had an especially wonderful and vigorous dance with a male partner, meeting and sweetly challenging each other over and over again. Yay!

Moving into the community circle, something interesting happened: Dancing in community, without a partner but in close proximity with other dancers, can be just like dancing alone at the outer edge. It doesn’t have to be, but on Tuesday night, it often was.

We noticed this after the dance ended, when we were standing in a closing circle.

Toward the end of the evening, when I was in the community circle for the third or fourth time, I noticed I was feeling tired, slowing down. I had already danced vigorously for an hour and a half, and I’m not a late night person — my batteries were running down.

I noticed that when I’m fatigued, I just want to dance alone, to wind down, to care for myself in vulnerability. I could have moved to the outer circle, but I didn’t. Maybe I was just too tired to think of doing that. That was a choice that perhaps I could make differently, next time.

I love the name Movement Lab. I’ve long considered ecstatic dance to be my own personal experimental movement lab. Movement, people, space, music, life. Play with it, learn from it, I be me, you be you, we be us.

“The 5 rhythms are a contemporary shamanic Zen practice” ~ Gabrielle Roth

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Okay, so science has recently showed us that dancers have genes for transcendence and social connection. (And if you don’t dance, maybe you have these genes too and don’t know it yet. And consider this: if stress turns on the bad genes, maybe the opposite of stress — joy? contentment? — turns on the good genes! Just sayin’….)

In this interview, Gabrielle Roth explains the connection between ecstatic dance, Zen, and shamanic practices.

The 5Rhythms are a contemporary Zen, Shamanic practice. Zen, in that they are a map to an inner journey for seekers of wisdom and freedom, the wisdom to know who we are and the freedom to get over ourselves. Shamanic, in that they address the Great Divide, the divorce of spirit from flesh that has created the loss of soul, which haunts us. We’ve rendered the soul homeless, it can’t breathe, exist, or move disconnected from the body. The body is the womb of the soul, a begging bowl for spirit, like Aretha when she sings….

The fastest way to still the mind is to move the body. All the profound spiritual teachings in this world don’t mean anything if they’re not embodied. Feeling totally high and connected to the divine mystery while sitting on a meditation pillow is fine, but how do we put the rubber to the road? As Charlie Parker said, If you don’t live it, it won’t come out your horn. So I take refuge in the 5Rhythms practice to keep my horn in tune.

There are videos of Gabrielle as well on the site. Check ’em out!

Repost: Gabrielle Roth: The Most Badass Teacher of Our Time

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Gabrielle Roth: The Most Badass Teacher of Our Time. | elephant journal.

Here’s another tribute to Gabrielle Roth that I couldn’t resist sharing for its first sentence:

Gabrielle Roth was the most truthful, determined, vibrant, hilarious, seductively ferocious person I have ever encountered.

My Austin dance community danced our farewell to Gabrielle yesterday. I couldn’t attend all of it — it was one of those days when I could have used a clone or two, there was so much deliciousness going on — but I did get some good dancing in, and some savory connecting, and I took my favorite healing stone to sit on the altar and soak up the energy of the room and touch/be touched by many of the gifted healers who dance.

We danced fiercely, with abandon and so many huge smiles, mine among them.

It was also our last dance in that space where we first danced 14 years ago, and so it was a milestone day for that reason as well. We move into a new space next month. I felt so much gratitude for so many people whom I’ve danced with over the years, knowing I will see many of them in a few weeks.

We honored the teachers who brought the rhythms and ecstatic dance to Austin in 1994: Claire Alexander (now a 5 rhythms teacher in Mountain View and Santa Cruz, CA), Carola Marashi (leading an ecstatic dance in Ashland, OR), and Terry Teaters.

And Gabrielle. Of course.

I was sorry to miss the ceremony led by Lisa DeLand, the 5 rhythms teacher in Austin.

Thanks also to Elephant Journal and the writer of the original post, Natasha Blank.

As with taking yoga and NLP into places that need it, like prisons and schools (which I’ve done and will keep doing), so there is a way to share the 5 rhythms in the places that most need it, 5Rhythms Reach Out. Here’s a direct link: http://www.5rro.org/

I would not ask you to donate if I didn’t believe in it enough to donate myself. I’ve made a donation, and you can too.

I just keep remembering how expanding, affirming, and life-changing it was to first encounter the 5 rhythms 18 years ago. There are many, many people whose lives are more sheltered and laden with suffering who are waiting for this transformational work, and they don’t even know it. 5Rhythms Reach Out will find and teach (and transform) them.

Gabrielle RothOne of my favorite Gabrielle quotes is this:

The problem is, we’re just too fucking alive! (said when someone complained about the noise and activity of a bunch of dancers after a workshop)

I say:

If that’s your problem, I’ll have what you’re having!

 

In remembrance of Gabrielle Roth: freedom is our holy work

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One of the significant teachers in my life died yesterday, and I’ve struggled with writing about it. I find myself getting too heady, and yet this loss is actually so profound that when I took a nap yesterday, I dreamed I was balancing upside down on my head on a dance floor, surrounded by lively, active children.

When I woke, I could feel the pressure on the crown of my head.

Headstand is definitely about changing perspective.

I stumbled into ecstatic dance 18 years ago, first encountering the 5 rhythms of Gabrielle Roth and Sweat Your Prayers after I left church as something I could no longer take part in with integrity.

I found a tribe, a practice, and a way of experiencing myself and the world as energy.

I’m not sure, but I suspect that the latter is the change in perspective that I’m integrating with this shock of loss and review of Gabrielle’s influence on my life, that it’s all just energy all the time, and it’s always changing, always dancing. The best I can ever do is to be centered, grounded, embodied, and ready to meet it. What’s solid is awareness.

I’ve had issues and struggles at times with that tribe, practice, and worldview, and they have deeply shaped me. I keep coming back.

Here’s what ecstatic dance is to me: being free, feeling joy, being embodied, clearing, cleansing, breathing, sweating, extending myself, being aware, taking care of my body, pushing to my edge and beyond, being in the moment, sharing, delighting, inquiring, discovering, connecting, having compassion, being inspired, seeing, allowing, playing, surrendering, breaking myself open, feeling what comes up, being danced, letting go, grieving, dancing with other versions of me, dancing with the entire room including the space, letting life and everything flow through me, being totally and completely alive, being fully present, blowing all the blocks out of my energy channels.

I feel so grateful to have found this and that I am able to do this.

Thank you, Gabrielle Roth, for your life’s work. Thank you, dancing tribe.

Here’s Gabrielle in her own words.

I became a mapmaker for others to follow, but not in my footsteps, in their own. Many of us are looking for a beat, something solid and rooted where we can take refuge and begin to explore the fluidity of being alive, to investigate why we often feel stuck, numb, spaced-out, tense, inert, and unable to stand up or sit down or unscramble the screens that reflect our collective insanity.

The question I ask myself and everyone else is, “Do you have the discipline to be a free spirit?” Can we be free of all that binds and bends us into a shape of consciousness that has nothing to do with who we are from moment to moment, from breath to breath?

Dance is the fastest, most direct route to the truth — not some big truth that belongs to everybody, but the get down and personal kind, the what’s-happening-in-me-right-now kind of truth. We dance to reclaim our brilliant ability to disappear in something bigger, something safe, a space without a critic or a judge or an analyst.