“Get out of your head. Into your feet. Into motion.”

-Gabrielle Roth

What is the 5Rhythms movement practice created by Gabrielle Roth?

The 5Rhythms is a simple, powerful movement practice. There are no specific steps to follow but your own authentic, organic movement. The practice has the power to catalyze creative expression and deep healing. Dancing the 5Rhythms is a map to finding yourself.

What are the 5Rhythms?

“Dance is the most immediate way of expressing the body’s essential rhythms…”
-Gabrielle Roth, Maps to Ecstasy

Human beings are rhythms. Breath is rhythm. Heartbeat is rhythm. Cells are rhythm. All of life is rhythms and cycles. Day and night, light and dark, birth and death, seasons, and the ocean are examples of life’s organic, rhythmic, wave-like ebb and flow. Rhythms are the essence of life and who we are. Over time, we may lose our connection with our rhythms. Disconnect, disharmony, and dismemberment can result. Dancing the 5Rhythms helps people return to a more embodied presence.

Fundamental to the 5Rhythms, everything alive is energy moving in waves, patterns, and rhythms. Each rhythm is a different energy field that human beings move through in a wave. Part of our essential makeup, the 5Rhythms form a series of healing maps created by Gabrielle Roth for the body, heart, mind, soul, and spirit.

1. Flowing—fluidity through continuous, grounded expression in sensual spirals of your body’s movements with your feet connected to the Earth united with the flow of your own energy to cultivating restorative input to your being

2. Staccato—focused percussive, pulsing inner beat released as output into physical shapes with tense edges revealing boundaries that provide insights into your feelings and allow expression of your heart through your body

3. Chaos—freedom of the mind through unifying opposites, dissolving patterns, and letting go into the unknown by releasing in your organic catalytic wild, unpredictable movements

4. Lyrical—essence of the soul where the weight of self-consciousness dissolves and expansion occurs into a lightness of being revealing your uniqueness and connection with the bigger picture of existence

5. Stillness—unified emptiness of inner peace and inspiration connected to love and compassion where you let go into gentle movements that rise and fall, start and end, in a field of silence comprised of nothing and everything

What are the potential benefits to the body, mind, and spirit through the 5Rhythms?

Moving through the waves of the 5Rhythms is a spiritual practice of self-discovery illuminating the essence of life on and off the dance floor. Organic movement through a dancing body reveals endless inner reflections. The body expresses through movement what it may not communicate or reveal in other ways. Releasing through a body in motion invites a rhythmic balance between right and left, feminine and masculine, input and output, parasympathetic and sympathetic, harmony and disharmony. Developing strong roots through your feet on the ground and letting go of the beat supports this process.

As the physical body releases through rhythmic movement, the mental constructs relax. Chatter ceases. Dancing through the 5Rhythms helps people get out of their heads. The mind becomes liberated. “If you put the psyche in motion, it will heal itself,” said Gabrielle Roth.

Integration within the mind-body opens a gateway for the spirit to expand. The 5Rhythms is a catalyst into an embodied presence where spiritual awakening occurs. Deep experiences in soulful states provide insights into identity and purpose. Dancing the 5Rhythms helps people experience the bigger picture by returning to and connecting with their truest essence. This remembering contains profound healing.

What do people experience and learn from the 5Rhythms?

“The five rhythms are the essence of the body in motion, the body alive. The 5Rhythms are states of being. They are maps to everywhere we want to go, on all planes of consciousness—inner and outer, forward and back, physical, emotional and intellectual. They are markers on the way back to a real self, a vulnerable, wild passionate, instinctive self. In dancing them you can unearth a freestyle movement vocabulary rooted in unexpected, fresh ways of moving—visceral and highly personal. In dancing them you can track perceptions and memories; seek out gestures and shapes; tune into instincts and intuitions. They reveal ways to creatively express aggressiveness and vulnerability, emotions and anxieties, edges and ecstasies. They reconnect us to cycles of birth, death and renewal and hook us up to the spirit in all living things. They initiate us back into the wisdom of our bodies and unleash movement’s dynamic healing power. Dancing the 5Rhythms is a practice, a dynamic way to both workout and to meditate in the same breath. They teach us that life is energy in motion, freeing us from any fixed notions about people, places, objects or ideas. In dancing them the body becomes our spiritual path.”
-Gabrielle Roth

Where is information about the 5Rhythms classes and workshops? Do specific classes exist for people affected by cancer?

People affected by cancer can experience the deep benefits of the 5Rhythms through classes and workshops offered by certified teachers around the world. If classes do not exist in your community, videos available through Raven Recording provide instructions about the 5Rhythms.

Some 5Rhythms classes specifically for people affected by cancer are provided in various locations. We do not have that current information. But cancer patients do not require a special, specific class for people with cancer.

Where is profound information from Gabrielle Roth about dealing with cancer?

Gabrielle Roth lived with Stage IV lung cancer after diagnosed in July 2009 for over three years. Applying her profound 5Rhythms movement practice that she has taught across the world for the last fifty years, Gabrielle has navigated through her cancer journey with incredible strength and wisdom.

In Dancing with Cancer provided free through Sounds True, Gabrielle shares profound information about health and healing through cancer and other challenges. She speaks about how the 5Rhythms have helped people accelerate their healing and deal with cancer. Whether you know you dance the 5Rhythms or not, have cancer or not, listen to Gabrielle Roth’s Dancing with Cancer. Gabrielle is totally wise, totally fascinating, totally raw and real. Her brilliance helps each person move deeper within. Cancer patients especially need centering and support.

What is the history of the 5Rhythms?

Gabrielle Roth founded the 5Rhythms in the 1960s teaching movement at the Esalen Institute in Big Sur, California. Hundreds of certified 5Rhythms teachers are now around the world.

Gabrielle and her husband Robert Ansell also record and produce music by Gabrielle Roth and the Mirrors through their label Raven Recording.

For More Information

• 5Rhythms
• Maps to Ecstasy by Gabrielle Roth
• Sweat Your Prayers by Gabrielle Roth
• Connections by Gabrielle Roth