For years, I wrote about my own experiences on the 5Rhythms dancing path almost every week. It was posted both on my own website and on the official 5Rhythms site. Since I became a 5Rhythms teacher, however, a lot of that creative energy now goes into designing experiences for participants in my own classes and I haven’t written about my own practice as much.
I want to write about my perspective as a teacher on last night’s “Body Waves: Paint My Spirit Gold” class, since this time it was extra clear how much the participants teach me.
It’s been a challenging stretch, and leading up to class, my personal energy was low.
I plan the scope and sequence for each theme far in advance, and I had planned to offer a class with an emphasis on the rhythm of Lyrical. However, I had been feeling anxious and heavy-hearted, and it was hard to imagine how I could possibly embody Lyrical, which is often associated with joy and lightness.
I thought about changing the plan and instead offering a Flowing class with an emphasis on grounding, or maybe a Chaos class with an emphasis on messiness.
In the end, I decided to stay the course, and find a way to connect to Lyrical exactly as I am at this time.
I managed to gather music by Thursday night, but still couldn’t visualize how it would come together.
That day, I had several things dropped on me. Despite a full-court-press, I didn’t complete the tasks I needed to, though I was at work by 7:30AM. Sleep the night before wasn’t great and I wasn’t feeling particularly flexible or well-resourced. I realized yet another task I had to complete just as I was leaving work and plopped down with my coat still on to bang it out.
I got a message on the group chat for “Body Waves” crew that several would be able to make it to class, along with some enthusiastic and supportive words. “Crew” doesn’t seem quite accurate. This group includes two old friends and two new friends; and it’s starting to feel like a family. Their messages warmed me up on the cold afternoon, but I was still feeling low energy and slightly nauseous.
I arrived before 6PM and found that everything we needed was in the space, and that one crew member had arrived before me.
I actually love setting up for class when it’s not stressful; and this time it went smoothly.
I thought back to when I was teaching at the Joffrey and had to bring all speakers, sound equipment, and visuals by car to every single class, and softened with gratitude for how much the process has eased.
The first participant arrived at 6:15 for the 7PM class and wandered in to where we were setting up. We got her checked in and settled in an adjacent studio while we completed preparations.
Before long, I put on low, tonal music and gave the person who was checking people in a thumbs up. She started letting people in around 6:45PM.
Following the stretching music, I put on an Indie Rock song that aligned to the theme, Paint My Spirit Gold, and looked across the room, wondering how it would land. It was quite a transition, and I knew there was a chance it would flatten people out, and that they might need to be coaxed into moving.
To my surprise, many responded right away, beginning to sway and make their way up onto their feet.
It’s not always like that. People could come in locked in grief, not having slept in days, constrained in anxiety. You just don’t know. But on this night, people seemed to arrive very much ready and eager to move.
My whole system started to relax and have fun, and I made some trips around the room, pausing to dance with people along the way.
I offered a few prompts to help us ground in the rhythm of Flowing, but mostly let the music carry the wave.
As the first wave started to dissipate, I invited people to continue to move while I offered a few comments. I spoke into the mic as I moved throughout the room, sharing that I was considering changing the rhythm that I would emphasize during this class since I wasn’t feeling particularly connected to Lyrical, but that I had decided to go ahead anyway.
What came through is that Lyrical, though associated with lightness and joy, is a deeper energy. It holds joy, lightness, and too, fear, rage, grief, shame, and everything else inside of it. In fact, it holds everything in our experience inside this vast, spacious container, and like a soaring bird of prey takes in the panorama from above, seeing the entire picture.
I also shared that it took me years to learn the pathway to Lyrical, and that I would often panic when the room shifted from the rhythm of Chaos into Lyrical. One of the stories that blocked me from accessing Lyrical was the incorrect belief that if I was in joy it would be an affront to another’s suffering.
I also shared a quote by the baby boomer, African American poet Toi Derracotte, “Joy is an act of resistance.”
I love the idea that joy is not just self-indulgent, but that it can also serve.
If we are mean, afraid, small, tight, myopic, righteous…we are easy to control. But if we step into the full spaciousness and power of Lyrical, we can move mountains.
There are so many gifts practice has given me, but this is one of the most precious ones.
I put on a song called “Blessings” and many responded right away, beginning to gather into a second wave.
The next song was a thick, heavy Flowing track, and I cut it short to put on a soaring track with a waltz time signature. I made my way through the room and noticed that one dancer had started to waltz, stepping and holding both arms up, then letting them cascade down and stepping again while swaying his arms up again. He inspired me and I, too, started to waltz. Soon, the entire room seemed to be waltzing. I moved back to the DJ table with a big smile on my face, and continued to watch the room with delight.
The wave moved quickly from there, and the room seemed dynamic and charged. One woman was off to the side stretching and swaying. I put on a longer track then made my way over to check in. She smiled and said she was fine. “Ok! Do whatever feels right to you!” I said and moved away, thinking of a recent experience when I was having a hard time, and really would have appreciated it if the teacher had checked in with me.
Sometimes I have to work hard to keep myself grounded during class as the energy gathers and rises, but on this occasion, I felt gentle, present, and delighted.
I joined with another dancer, dipping our shoulders toward each other and circling around.
Tears rose up as the class wound down, and many dancers continued to move with wholehearted, creative expression.
I had arrived feeling tight, anxious, nauseous, and now here I was in the deep silence when the music ends and before anyone moves or says anything, just oozing gratitude, with gold spilling out all over.
After class, I ate with one of the crew members. She is less than half my age and is very wise. She shared her perspective on recent developments on the national stage, and I nodded, soaking it in.
One thing she said is that she knew she was always going to be involved in the fight for justice, and “that’s never changing.” This idea, that it’s not a failure that justice has not been achieved, but that it would always be in process, and that engaging in the process is worthwhile, touched me deeply.
I’ve always known that I gain a lot in the role of teacher, both in my daytime work with high school teens, and in my nighttime work teaching the 5Rhythms to adults, but on this day, it was an extra powerful dose of medicine.
I went to bed after midnight, slept over nine hours, and woke feeling optimistic, and remembering that God is everywhere, thanks in every measure to these wholehearted, powerful students who helped me to remember.
President Biden’s decision to step aside is a powerful example of surrender–a theme I’m still immersed in following the two-day 5Rhythms workshop “Surrender” that was led by Croatian 5Rhythms teacher Silvija Tomcik.
Friday I was unavoidably late. I just accepted a new job and a new role, and needed to attend a work event. I’ll be a founding teacher at a brand new high school.
This is exciting because I love beginnings. I love the creative territory when we have to create the map, when we can’t rely on what’s already in place. As a visual artist, I’m trained to make somethings from nothings; and I love feeling like anything is possible.
With Silvija’s skillful guidance, this is the territory we explored–the territory of Chaos, which is the third of the 5Rhythms.
Chaos is where we surrender to reality exactly as it is. Where we stop clinging to the past and grabbing toward the future. Where we let go of old habits and identities. And, as Biden embodied today, where we stop clinging to power and instead make space for something new to arise.
I don’t know what happened before I arrived on Friday, but by the time I got there people already seemed very sweaty and softened. I entered as gently as I could, and Silvija greeted me with a wide, wholehearted embrace. I joined two other dancers on the floor where we each spoke about where Chaos is showing up in our life at this time.
For me, I was almost never in Chaos for the first year that I danced. I thought I was in Chaos, but I was actually in a very fast, agitated Staccato–the second of the 5Rhythms. I hadn’t realized it, but I was actually afraid of Chaos. Afraid of being out of control and causing harm–a pattern I knew far too well.
The part of my life when I was most out of control is coming up for examination again now. Truthfully, I spent many years confused about what it means to be a free spirit. I thought it meant rebellion and saying fuck you to social norms and throwing myself recklessly into intense experiences.
I made a lot of unskillful choices during that time. My fourteen-year-old son, Simon, is taking a behavioral neuroscience class and part of what they are exploring are the impacts of alcohol and drug use on the brain, especially on developing brains. He’s wondering about how my choices might have impacted me and how they might have impacted him, and is asking a lot of hard questions.
Another reason I avoided Chaos is that I had somehow internalized that I was too big, too wild, too messy; and I had spent decades trying unsuccessfully to make myself smaller and tidier. When Chaos finally broke through for real, completely by accident, I was broken apart. My entire self sobbed and rocked and shook. I could finally just be myself. My whole self. Not my ideal self, not the self society makes of me, not the self I was trying to be to avoid triggering my partner at the time, not the fixed self that my ego is always angling for.
But instead someone real and alive and actually free.
So many practices are about trying to contain Chaos. Trying to control things. Staying positive, always being our best, being on point, holding ourselves together. But in the 5Rhythms, we understand that Chaos is an essential part of the creative process.
It’s because of Chaos that I decided to marry the 5Rhythms; and during the almost two decades since have become a 5Rhythms teacher myself.
For the rest of the session, Silvija guided us through exercises that encouraged us to integrate the spine and the head into our movement. She said, “The head is part of the rest of the body, not just up here all judge-y and critical.” She demonstrated humorously with her own body, and then showed us what the opposite would look like, when instead of the head being a tyrant who rules over the rest of the body, we drop down and surrender.
I took this on wholeheartedly, eventually moving through the entire space as I curved and twisted and undulated and dropped my head down and let it follow the rest of the body again and again.
At the end of the session I texted Simon, who was home alone at that point. He asked me to call him on facetime so he could show me something. Our kitten George had launched himself off the top of the kitchen cabinets and knocked down a large ceiling light fixture which shattered on the tile floor. Simon started his story with “This man…” I belly-laughed the whole way home.
I’ve been meaning to replace the outdated light fixture; and you could say George helped me make way for something new with his own flying leap of surrender.
The next morning, I found an unpublished text that I wrote about Silvija’s “Read My Hips” workshop in 2019. At that workshop, too, Silvija offered many new tools and insights. One that has been important for my own process is that moving the hips moves the spine which moves the head. When I teach and I say, “Maybe imagine that your spine is a roller coaster and your head is the very last car,” this comes directly from insights during Silvija’s “Read My Hips” workshop.
The next morning, I was determined to arrive on time following my late arrival the night before. I felt emotional as I walked from the J train to Paul Taylor studio on the Lower East Side. Part of my new job role will be teaching Art, and I kept thinking about ways to move with my students and open the doorway to the creative process, beyond just offering the tangible skills of art-making.
I silently greeted many friends of a decade or more, including several 5Rhythms teachers who were in my same teacher training cohort–a bond that is very meaningful to me.
We danced and danced and danced and danced. Sometimes alone, sometimes in partnership, sometimes in groups.
Early on, Silvija invited us to move in the first rhythm, Flowing, as though we were on an ocean boat, rocking with the swelling sea. I loved this, and rose and fell and circled and ranged through the big studio, allowing my legs and spine to buckle and soften and pull me deeper into circling.
We danced a full Chaos wave, then moved to different kinds of music that could be embodied as Chaos.
At one point, Silvija had us interact with a partner and move with something we want to surrender, and then what it would look and feel like if we actually did surrender this thing.
My partner went first. Then it was my turn. Per Silvija’s instructions, I whispered what I wished to surrender into my partner’s ear, “Blame and resentment.”
For years, I kept tweaking my left ankle; and I worried that if I really kept throwing myself into the dance as I’d been doing, I would injure it again. I also noticed a pain in my left hip flexor and groin. Lately sometimes after sitting, I get up and limp because it gets pinched and tight. I’ve had some brutal muscle pulls over the years, and I thought, this body has held up for 51 years. I’m so blessed that it’s not breaking down yet. But I should take it easy, I should moderate. I will get hurt if I fling myself into this in the way that I want to.
Curiously, when I sat down to write this, I totally forgot that I had been afraid. It took several layers to get back to it. I kept remembering, then it would jump out of my head again, and I’d be sitting in front of the computer thinking, What was it that I was about to write?
Probably it was my imagination, but a presence next to me said, “Don’t worry, you’ll be ok.”
I went all in. Dancing blame and resentment: pointing my finger, tightening my face, slamming my raised elbow backward, controlling my hips. Then I went all in with surrender, even moving throughout the room with maximum intensity, somehow with all the energy I needed–spinning, dipping, letting my head and spine stretch out and arc, touching down with my fingertips then stepping up and diagonally, coiling and twisting and twittering on the razor’s edge of completely out of control.
Later, my partner from the surrender exercise passed me in the hall to the bathroom.
They said, “I received a message for you.”
“Oh? What was it?”
“The message that came through was ‘You are protected.’ ”
I thanked them and slightly bowed my head, then continued down the hall.
We took only a short lunch break. I sat alone briefly, thinking I might make some notes. When I realized I had no pencil, I surrendered to not making notes, and happened to find one of my closest friends, who herself had been planning to make notes, but her pen had stopped working. She too surrendered and we instead took time to connect and share our experiences.
I stepped to the foyer outside the studio, where there were snacks and tea, and one friend shared that she was confused about these new and sometimes conflicting aspects of Chaos. I said, “I hear you. Sometimes I realize I’m working too hard with a prompt, and I just say, ‘fuck it’ let me just dance.” It’s possible I was giving advice more to myself than to my friend, as is often the case.
I also shared that to me, Chaos has two faces.
There is the intensity, the buildup, the press toward maximum expression and the moment when it explodes. This can also be a feeling of breaking through ropes or a straightjacket, a cathartic throwing off of societal conditioning, traumatic holding, oppression, existential gunk, and the relentless tyranny of should.
The other face of Chaos is the face of surrender. This face is much softer. It is a totally different kind of freedom. It lets everything in without having to relate the self to it, and lets everything right back out without clinging or pushing away. It is a freefall in the dynamic unfolding of all that is, ever moving and shifting and changing. It’s where the ordinary world and the absolute collide and we realize that everything, absolutely everything, is part of this vast, exquisite cosmic dance.
I had a dream when I was a teen that I’ll never forget. I was inside a painting that was in the process of becoming. It wasn’t so much about the material or the frame, but that I was inside, immersed in the very creative process, the irrepressible, unbridled, dynamic expression of life force.
When I first started dancing the 5Rhythms, artwork exploded out of me. Since then, I’ve surrendered much of my fixed identity as a visual artist, and instead open myself to the flow of creation as it arises, including creating 5Rhythms classes for the participants I’m blessed to work with.
I’ve become more of a midwife than a master; and it no longer matters to me what form creation takes, only that I swim in its river and am at its service.
This brings me tears as I write. What a blessing to live a creative life. Gabrielle Roth, the creator of the 5Rhythms practice, wrote in her first book, Maps to Ecstasy, “If you like to write, you don’t have to make the bestseller list: write letters to your friends, poems to your lover. Sing to your children. Make something for your mother. Once you enter the creative mode, you discover what it means to live in your soul.”
After our brief lunch, we continued to dance, exploring Chaos as it lives in each of the different rhythms.
Silvija playfully challenged those of us who actually seek out Chaos instead of just surrendering to it when it comes, and kept up a stream of prompts and suggestions to support our investigation throughout the afternoon.
Feeling loose and alive, I stopped at a grocery store on the way home, and the woman working at the checkout noticed and commented. I can’t remember her exact words, but it was something about shining.
I waited for the train next to a broken video screen. It was still working, but the glass was spider-web-shattered and the image twittered in disjointed ribbons.
I come back again and again to what Gabrielle said when she laid down the map of the 5Rhythms for us, “It takes discipline to be a free spirit.”
To my immense surprise and delight, I realize that I have become a free spirit. All it took was practice.
Thank you, Silvija. Thank you, Gabrielle. From the depths of my wild, free spirit. Thank you.
