“Step back you’re dancing kinda close. I feel a little pulse running through…”
Stepping out onto the deck at Commodore Barry, a NYC public pool in Fort Greene, I see a little dance party breaking out with some staff and join in. They welcome me enthusiastically; and we all wiggle and shimmy for a few joyful minutes.
“Thank you! It’s been such a hard day. And this made me so happy!” I try to hide that I’m heaving with sobs and make my way to the lap swim side of the pool. I greet a very dear, old friend, then push off the wall, loving the dancing ribbons of sunlight on the bottom of the pool and chugging hard, slapping my feet as I come over in the turns.
After our swim, I sit in the park with the same friend, and a whole cascade of woes come tumbling out.
The top one is that I lost a good friend two days ago. Many of us lost a good friend. Hundreds, maybe even thousands just lost a good friend. A viola player and teacher, she was loved by many, and was incredibly accomplished in her field. She has been my collaborator in a weekly dance class for almost two years; and we’ve worked closely together.
She was one of very few people in the world who honestly believed I am completely correct and good. I’m starting to think she thought that of a lot of people, though I still choose to believe that we had a special connection.
We’ve danced it and danced it and danced it.
One day in late June, her brother, who has been her devoted caretaker, sent messages to many of her friends and family sharing that she was at the stage of hospice and would love to see us.
Karen Ritscher’s doctor said she had come to a point when they could no longer treat her illnesses and that she likely had just a day or two left.
I went running.
When I walked into her hospital room, she said, “Did you hear? I’m dying! But I feel great. I’m not in pain. And I don’t have to worry about anything now.” She also shared that she has no regrets.
In the hospital, we danced to the song “On the Other Side of Here” by our teacher, Gabrielle Roth. Karen seemed radiant.
As I left, I said good bye, I thought for the very last time.
She shared that she wanted to be at home so she could be with her cats, and her brother and sister made it happen. She was set up in the middle of her living room with a hospital bed and a bell she could use to call her brother if she needed him at night.
The next time I visited I was sure would be the last.
“How are you, Karen?”
“I’m good, except I’m trying to die, and I’m not doing a very good job at it,” she joked.
She was dressed up, in makeup and oversize, stylish glasses. Her eyes shone, and she seemed to be glowing. There were hospice tubes and equipment, but the room was dominated by crystals, special objects, artwork, and the scent of the many cut flowers that were in vases on every surface of the room, including the top of the baby grand piano.
I got to spend the afternoon with her that day. There were people in and out, but I was blessed to have her mostly to myself for many patient minutes. Time washed over us like water, nowhere to go, nothing to prove, nothing to be. Only presence and love. And so many beautiful stories.
Her brother, David, massaged her feet as she told another story.
I said good bye. I said I love you. I said I’ll see you on the other side. “I’ll see you on the other side,” she said in response, her bright eyes shining.
Then I went away for a week, thinking I would never get to see Karen again in this life.
After I got back, Karen was still with us. I led Body Waves, the 5Rhythms class that Karen and I created together, on Friday night. Despite mid-summer travel, we were at capacity, and there was an extra flavor of the sacred.
The rhythm that led us on that Friday night was Stillness, the rhythm of the absolute. The place that all things arise from and return to. This was the same rhythm that vibrated in Karen’s living room as she moved through her final graceful exit.
I danced on Sunday morning. Hard! Really hard. Drenched-with-sweat, ring-out-your-clothes hard.
I saw David on the way in to class. He shared that Karen had almost left us in the very early morning, that he had been in ritual with her for much of the night.
I kept my eye on David for much of the dance. At one point, I couldn’t lay eyes on him, and feared he’d left because of receiving news. I lingered near him as much as I could. Then I thought maybe I should stay near the door. In case he was leaving early so I could drive him.
Eventually, I realized that I was trying too hard to control what wasn’t actually controllable, and let go of tracking David, surrendering fully into the dance, sinking low into the hips, rocking my pelvis, and sharing dances with anyone who crossed my path and was receptive to partnership.
At the end of the class, David was still there.
I asked if it would be ok to drive him home; and maybe even visit Karen. He checked his calendar, checked in with a possible lunch date, then said sure, let’s do it.
So I got to see Karen one more time. My third good bye. I was all sweaty from dance, but she was again well turned out in a beautiful dress–a black ground with brightly colored stripes. A friend had organized a pedicure, and her toenails were an impeccable cherry red–the same color as her viola case.
This time the room was very full, and I had to share Karen with many friends and family members.
On Monday night I barely slept.
Tuesday morning I woke to David’s text message, simply stating “Karen has passed on.”
I spent the day scrub-cleaning the entire apartment and talking on the phone, sharing grief and memories with others who also loved Karen.
Again, we danced. The very same night. 5Rhythms teacher Ray Diaz was leading, and Laura and Tsonga, who had been Karen’s drumming teacher, accompanied on drums.
“I have some news,” I whispered in the ear of a long-time dancer-friend. Her face grew reflective and attentive. “Oh no. I already know what you’re going to say.”
Ray dragged us low, pushed us to explore the room, and modulated long stretches of Chaos with softer passages in the face of the grueling heat.
I was in white to honor spirit. My long skirt got under my feet so I tucked its edges into the waistband and got low, rocking, vibrating, shimmying.
After a warmup, Tsonga and Laura began to drum, Laura holding steady, Tsonga with syncopated polyrhythms.
Ray talked about salsa, which he shared was part of his personal heritage, and how it’s all based on four counts. He said there are set combinations, 89 in total. In contrast to salsa’s set forms, he encouraged us to break out of our patterns.
I loved this encouragement, but I realized I was actually on the opposite journey. I had just come back from Puerto Rico with my son and niece. Dancing salsa, it was a challenge for me to follow, and a challenge for me to be on the same beat as everyone else.
That’s one of the reasons collaborating with Karen on the Body Waves class was such a joy. It’s not easy to work with other people when your own beat is a wildly galloping fireworks display, but with Karen, who meets the force of my chaotic explosiveness with her own wild beat, we found a rhythm together.
We joined forces in late 2023, and took turns leading different themes over the course of several weeks. Despite her incredible determination, she was ravaged with several serious diseases. I can’t really know what it took her to show up every night she was scheduled, but I do imagine it must have taken superhuman effort.
Karen left us on Tuesday in the very early morning–the sacred stretch just before the night transitions back into day.
That Tuesday night, I felt like I could hear and feel Karen everywhere.
At the end of the class, I found a vibrant Stillness, with pauses and twitters, my hands sometimes scurrying after one another, my upper body tilting forward, balanced by a leg or arm, seeming to find new ways to expand my energetic field.
As the music faded away, a group of a dozen or so dancers surrounded David on the floor, embracing and supporting him, and perhaps comforting our own selves in the process.
5Rhythms teacher Alyssa Jurewicz-Johns, who in May joined Karen and I in offering the Body Waves class, led a beautiful session on Friday night. It ended with a ritual where each participant was invited to say their name and share one gesture in Karen’s honor.
The Sunday after Karen’s transition, David gathered local 5Rhythms teachers and a few producers and crew members to honor Karen’s legacy. We sat in a circle in her apartment and shared remembrances. I was touched when another 5Rhythms teacher asked me a question, opening a door and inviting me to share my story with the group. I heaved with sobs several times, both for grief and because the beauty of Karen’s life and legacy touched me so deeply.
One of Karen’s close friends, another 5Rhythms teacher, asked her often during this period, “How is it now?” One of the last times she asked this, Karen, radiant, answered, “Life is ecstasy.”
Most dear Karen, I celebrate your vibrant, generous, creative life. Thank you for your many gifts and blessings. I am better for having walked this stretch of the path with you. May your legacy flourish, may you have an auspicious rebirth, and may you continue to dance wherever you are now.
I’ll see you on the other side.
July 27, 2025, Broad Brook, Connecticut
Photo of Karen Ritscher with her viola by Julie Skarratt
Meghan LeBorious is an author, designer, mother, and educator. She has been dancing the 5Rhythms since 2008 and joined the circle of 5Rhythms teachers in 2021. She has also been formally practicing meditation since 2006 within a tradition that emphasizes the idea that everything we experience, including painful emotions and challenges, can be included on the path to self-discovery and freedom. This writing is about her personal experiences on the 5Rhythms dancing path; and does not necessarily represent the views of the 5Rhythms organization.
I’m sitting at a heavy wood table, with pillar candles flickering in the fireplace. As it’s gotten darker, the snowfall has gotten faster.
The first thing I saw when I walked into Karen Ritscher’s Fire in the Belly 5Rhythms Heartbeat workshop in the blackbox studio at Gibney Dance was a bold installation, created by Maamoun Tabbo, with red lights and sheer, red fabric hung from high above eye level, crystals, a prominent pelvic bone, and a slinky black dress that once belonged to Gabrielle Roth, the creator of the 5Rhythms.
It held the space beautifully, and cast a glow throughout the room.
Karen opened Friday night even to people who weren’t attending the full workshop, and it was packed. We started with a wave, which is to say that we moved through each of the 5Rhythms–Flowing, Staccato, Chaos, Lyrical, and Stillness–in sequence.
This was the first time Karen offered the Fire in the Belly workshop, and I know it’s something she’s been called to offer for a long time.
Soon, we stepped into a partner exercise that was about working with our inner judge. To my surprise, I sped up and went into the rhythm of Chaos, moving toward and away from my partner and almost writhing into spinning. It had kind of an “in your face!” feel.
Chaos is why I first fell in love with the 5Rhythms. I spent many years of my life trying to tidy myself up, hold myself back, make myself smaller. But in Chaos, I found that I could be as gigantic as my spirit wanted to be–and that was often wild, explosive, and unruly. In so many traditions, Chaos is a thing to be tamed, to be opposed. But in the 5Rhythms, Chaos is seen as a necessary part of the creative process.
On this opening night of Fire in the Belly, however, I noticed there was a script running that believed if I became chaotic enough, I would be unknowable. I would move faster than my partner’s judgement could keep up.
This Chaos discovery was an interesting shock. Sometimes I’ve seen Chaos as a deeply-wired part of my nature. It has always seemed like a place of power and of healing for me, but this time Chaos came through like an escape habit–a way to be in a defensive position, and maybe even to outrun intimacy.
Drummer Tsonga of the Valley, Gabrielle Roth’s longtime collaborotor, and his colleague, Laura, settled in to provide rhythms for the packed room, and people went wild as the intensity rose and fell.
As I rode the J train back home to Brooklyn, I explored this new Chaos thread, and reminded myself that any seemingly skillful habit can just as easily become a type of ego armoring, depending very much on the layers of intention that we bring to it.
That night George-the-Kitten snuggled under my left armpit purring, but still I slept fitfully. I put my book away and settled into the pillow, but my system was amped up.
I found myself tangled in anxiety thinking. When a new anxiety thought would come through, I could feel the sudden release of stress chemicals near my solar plexus. It was almost like a sewage pipe suddenly bursting into action, pumping polluted water and waste into a river. Instead it was pumping chemicals into my system, as my heart rate spiked, and my muscles tightened in an almost choreographed dance. I kept noticing the scrunching of my eyes, the clenching of my arches, a lessening of space in the hip joints. Then it would start to dissipate until a new anxiety thought would come and it would trigger a new flush of chemicals.
Eventually my thoughts turned on myself directly; and I started doubting myself and my choices, and judging myself harshly.
The snow continues. I’m in a remote house in southern Connecticut, a rare night on my own. The only sounds are the occasional voices of the pets I’m here to care for.
In Tara Brach’s book Radical Acceptance, she writes about the Dalai Lama’s response when a western student asked him how one should deal with self-hatred. The Dalai Lama was incredulous. He asked how someone could think like that when we are all a part of Buddha nature. He just didn’t get it at all.
I watched as my mind beat me up. Eventually I must have slept, but there wasn’t even any clear moment of waking.
I gathered my things to prepare for the next day. I thought I would have a slow morning, but I ran late and had to rush.
I finally got myself to the J train to head in to Gibney Dance, but after just a couple of stops the train stopped on the track to wait for a stalled train ahead of us.
I missed most of the opening wave on Saturday, and as I stepped in Karen invited us to move back and forth across the floor, embodying qualities that block “fire in the belly” such as resistance, rigidity, and numbness.
Then she did the loveliest thing. She gathered one person’s hand, and then another’s, and just waited in silence until everyone noticed that we were moving into a circle, rose, and joined their hand to another’s.
We moved into a seated circle, and Karen shared a triangle model for us to consider: victim, savior, and perpetrator. An incredibly honest, funny conversation bubbled up, with each person spontaneously contributing real-life examples of how these roles play out in our lives–our inner victim stories, savior stories, and perpetrator stories.
When the circle dissolved, a glimpse of mirror peeked through the black velvet studio curtains; and I was surprised by my image. I’d had long hair since I was a teen, and I had just cut it short. It was thinner on the ends and in the back, and I’d basically kept it in an unruly knot at my crown for several years, dying it blond-ish to try to hide the streaky grey.
I knew it needed to be changed, but I’d been a person with long hair for so long, it was hard to imagine deleting that part of my identity.
My stylist–who I visit much less often than I technically should–is a friend from childhood. I showed her a picture of a short, curly style I’d seen muraled on a wall during a run through Ridgewood, Queens. She told me she thought she could get close to the picture. Then looked at me and said, “Are you sure you want to do this?” I surprised myself by responding, “Yes! It’s just hair, right? It will grow back if I don’t like it.”
After years of resistance to this small cosmetic change, I was suddenly bold. She started to cut and even while the hair was still wet, curls started to bounce up. She cut off the dyed hair and what was left was a blend of dark blond, light brown, grey, and white.
I peeked into the mirror, then pulled my head back, playing hide-and-seek with myself, wondering what took me so long and why I thought changing my hair was such a big deal. After so many years, I just took the leap and it was perfectly fine. Good, even.
Karen released us for lunch at this point. In the past, I would have gone outside to gather a snack or tea – a holdover from many years ago when I was a smoker and would always step out for any break. I briefly considered leaving, but decided it was too cold, and that all of my needs were met inside anyway. I assembled cheese and crackers from the lovely spread Karen and Mary Beth, the producer, arranged, and prepared a spicy black tea with milk.
For lunch, I joined inside the studio with the good friend I had shared the judgement exercise with–when I had the realization that I sometimes use Chaos to evade feeling known or judged. My friend’s impression was that I had demonstrated a big range of ways to deal with judgement, and that I kept trying out new things, rolling out new strategies. I loved this idea. It was interesting that her takeaway was so much kinder to me than my own.
Before long, more people joined us for lunch. When we were two or three, we sat in folding chairs, but as more people came, we all shifted to the ground, and widened the circle seamlessly.
Tsonga and Laura joined us on drums again on Saturday afternoon. My neck was a little sore from the night before, and I was grateful that this wave felt gentle.
I had a really hard time in a recent workshop, and here I was grateful to feel immersed, engaged, and in love with the practice.
In a partner share, I spoke something with a catch in my throat and realized its truth. That I have my dream job, and that in a lot of ways the stuff of vision boards is my reality. And, too, that a dream realized becomes subject to the challenges of day-to-day reality, though that doesn’t make it any less a dream come true.
I realized that this time for me is not so much about finding my voice and my path, as it is a matter of finding joy in all of it.
5Rhythms teacher Ann Kite from the Washington D.C area collaborated with Karen throughout the weekend. She led the opening wave on Sunday morning; and the statement I remember most is, “I want to feel everything.”
The day moved by like a river.
After Sunday lunch, Karen led us through a wave. One thing that stood out was a jaunty, playful, chugging staccato dance with a good friend. Later in the wave, I silently invited a new friend to follow me, and we moved throughout the space together, soon switching so I was following her–swooping through the empty spaces and around the other dancers, at times coming around and surprising each other and lighting up with delight.
As the light started to fade in the studio, Karen set up an exercise that gave us a chance to move with a question we were working with.
The question I posed was, “Should I stay attached to relative, everyday reality, or let that go completely and expand into the absolute?” Before this exercise I had been tired, but once we started to move, energy was perfectly available.
What unfolded was exquisitely beautiful, as one dancer represented each option and I got to interact with them. What I noticed was that I could embrace both fully. I could meet relative reality with tenderness, and could stay connected with absolute reality at the same time. It was less a binary choice than a radical allowing.
One of the dancers told me after, “I was ready to let you be with the absolute, but you kept pulling me back.”
With full darkness outside, we each took a partner and prepared to dance a prayer for an intention they shared. I was touched by partner’s supportive words when I shared my intention, and by their commitment to helping to bring my prayer into being. My partner’s intention inspired me, and I did my best to give myself wholeheartedly.
We ended in a standing circle, with each person drawing an index card from a large singing bowl and reading it aloud.
The cold is strident today, and the many surfaces covered with white snow make the light seem blinding.
I didn’t write this for the singing bowl at the workshop closing, but I’m writing it now:
This fire in the belly,
This fire in the heart,
Let me keep it alive with love and breath.
It is all so very precious and temporary.
Thank you, Karen. Thank you, Gabrielle. Thank you, universe. I am blessed and grateful.
This writing is not sanctioned or produced by the 5Rhythms organization, and represents only the personal experiences of the writer. Meghan LeBorious is a certified 5Rhythms teacher, longtime 5Rhythms practitioner, and is an educator, maker, mother, and author.
January 19, 2025, Easton, CT & February 9, Brooklyn, NY
