About 5Rhythms®

Created by Gabrielle Roth in the late 1970s, and practiced by tens of thousands worldwide.

5Rhythms® is a philosophy, perspective, performance art and a dynamic movement practice rooted in the principle that if you put psyche in motion it will heal itself. Movement is both the medicine and the metaphor, reaching across all languages, cultures and age groups to transform the suffering into art, art into awareness, awareness into action. 

Wherever the 5Rhythms are practiced, a community is born to dance, to sweat, to change, to support, and to provide a safe space for each of us to shatter the ego’s hold and awaken the juicy, unpredictable, fascinating, edge-walking, rock star part of ourselves that yearns to be free. 

5Rhythms® transcends dance—movement is the medicine, the meditation and the metaphor. Together we peel back layers, lay our masks down, and dance till we disappear.

5Rhythms® is a guided healing movement practice that is

based on somatic principles of the 5Rhythms map.

The map that maps out the rhythms and patterns and cycles of life: 

1. Flowing:  Earth - Being - Body - Feet - Birth - Feminine - Fluidity - Receptivity.  

Connecting to the earth - our ground - Letting in. 

  Freeing the body. 

 (Emotion -Fear)

Shadow of flowing: Inertia 

2. Staccato - Fire -Loving- Heart - Masculine - Expressive - Tribal - Letting out - extending and meeting the world from the center - childhood- hips and torso - expressing from the heart - connecting with who and what we love.

(Emotion - Anger)

Shadow of staccato - Control - tension - rigidity.

3. Chaos - Water - head- mind- knowing - the dance between the masculine and feminine - surrender -letting go - emptying the mind - creative possibility - releasing structure - relinquishing control -surrendering to knowing and not-knowing, to the inexplicable and infinite mystery.

(Emotions - Sadness) 

Shadow of chaos - out of control.

4. Lyrical - Air -Roam of the Soul - Seeing - Hands_ Expansion - Maturity - Freedom - Light -Joy - actor - messengers of the heart - inspired action - shapeshifter - seeing and saying - sharing - dreaming-celebration -Letting go of Letting go. Awakening the Soul.

(Emotions -Joy)

Shadow of lyrical - out of space.

5. Stillness - Ether -healing- spirit- breath -elderhood, death cycle - alchemist- medtation- altar- purity -Big Mind - Essence - Oneness - Open and empty space - return to zero, letting it be.

(Emotions - Compassion)

Shadow of stillness - numbness, death.

These rhythms are a state of being. 

They are a map to everywhere we want to go or look on all planes of consciousness, inner-outer, physical, emotional, and intellectual.

Why is the 5R a Philosophy, Perspective and Practice?

Philosophy-KNOWING

Perspective - SEEING

Practice - BEING 

From the perspective of 5Rhythms, we see everything like a wave, as a constant cycle of life.

We see beyond that which is matter and perceive everything as energy a way of seeing that instantly makes a significant shift. We see more clearly that we aren’t fixed beings, the mind cannot be fixed, nothing is fixed, everything moves and evolves and changes and shapeshifts, even death itself is a new birth, new beginning.

5Rhythms perspective holds the keys to exploring the shadows and light, sadness and grief, joy and ecstasy, power of forgiveness and compassion.

If you have a body, you can dance. Anybody can dance. 

This dance isn’t a performance, look at me kinda dance. 

This dance is a medicine, a tool to heal our body, heart, mind, and soul.

This dance teaches us that our body is a vehicle to unlock clogged places within.

This dance teaches us that our body is the temple, to find the god within.

What truly makes us depressed? 

Having a lack of inspiration, lack of vitality and freedom?

Its when we are stock in our mind, when we constantly guide by our stories, living in our past.

Fully navigating by inertia. By anger, sadness and sorrow.

This practice has changed my life. Brought me back to life, and it constantly guides me home over and over again.

We never reach the destination, but we learn how to dance the spiral of life, how to get up each time we fall, how to live again and again each time we die. 

How to find the way back home.