Gabrielle Roth, founder of the practice
Gabrielle Roth has turned thousands of people across the globe on to the inner, healing rhythms of their dancing souls, the creative brilliance of their innate originality and the unexpected daring to express themselves in theater, dance and poetry. Through her movement philosophy, the 5Rhythms®, Gabrielle and her certified teachers world-wide have helped people of all ages discover that when you put the psyche in motion, it heals itself.
Based in New York City, Gabrielle has written three books, produced three DVDs and 20 albums. Through her ongoing interactive-live theater, catalytic classes and workshops around the world, Gabrielle continues to inspire and guide people on the path of shaping life itself into a work of art.
She has been featured in Bazaar, Donna Karan’s Woman to Woman, Utne Reader, Self, Elle, Mademoiselle, New Age Journal, Body Mind Spirit, Shape and many other national publications.
Noted artist, philosopher and healer, Gabrielle Roth has devoted her life to exploring and communicating the language of primal movement and
experimental theater. Over the past 35 years,Gabrielle has taken thousands of people on a journey from physical and emotional inertia to the freedom
of ecstasy, from the tyranny of the chattering ego-mind to the blessed emptiness of stillness. Her labs and retreats have an electric intensity that mates contemporary currents of rock music, modern theater and poetry to the ancient pulse of
shamanism.
“Put your psyche in motion and it will heal itself” Gabrielle Roth
Author of MAPS TO ECSTASY and SWEAT YOUR PRAYERS, Gabrielle is the Artistic Director of her dance/theatre/music company, The Mirrors, and has been a member of the Actor’s Studio (PDU).
Her award winning musical recordings are on the cutting-edge of shamanic trance/dance music.
She is currently teaching experimental theater in New York based on The Roth
5 Rhythms™ and training others to use shamanic methods within artistic, education and healing contexts.
“Imagination involves giving your intuitions form. Playing out hunches. Making your visions happen. Enriching your world, putting your mark on it. The way you dress, the way you cook and eat, the way you arrange and furnish your home, the way you speak, write, think, all add up to your personal contribution. And it is your sacred task to express your true self with flare and authenticity, your gift to give the world. When students tell me they’d love to dance like me, I tell them: «Great, then dance like you.»
«The road to the self is not a straight line. It’s a continuum of circles, cycles, and waves that are all interconnected. Rhythms are connected to feelings are connected to sexual waves are connected to the life cycles are connected to archetypes are connected to levels of consciousness. Being is connected to birth is connected to mother is connected to body is connected to fear is connectes to inertia is connected to the flow. So, too, with death, the universe, spirit, stillness, compassion, inspiration, celibacy, and healing.
All these energies come together in you. In your deepest center, you are the stillpoint. You are the rhythm beyond stillness, the feeling beyond compassion, the sexual energy beyond celibacy, the life force beyond death, the vibration beyond inspiration.
The moving center is within you.»
Gabrielle Roth, Maps to Ecstasy
” Movement is my medicine, my meditation, my practice. It is what I do no matter how I feel. We are all born to move, To surrender to the beat. Your soul is a dancer. No effort, no judgment. Pure energy in the moment. I call my form of ecstatic dance the wave. It is a moving meditation and a great workout, using 5 basic rhythms that form a map to your innermost being. Moving through the wave is my spiritual practice.”
— Gabrielle Roth
“For me, being rooted means finding my feet, rocking in the rhythm of the world beat. When we dance, we wake up, we get down and juicy with ourselves, we have fun and forget all the heavy shit we carry around. In the dance we get real, get free, get over ourselves. Movement kicks ass.
When you truly surrender to your own rhythm, you look so cool, so mysterious, so seductive-the way you deep down really want to look but don’t trust that you do.”
From “Connections”
“The five rhythms are a map to everywhere you 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. A self worth dying a thousand ego-deaths for, to embody, embrace, and emancipate your soul.” Gabrielle Roth, Sweat Your Prayers
“On the dance floor, meeting complete strangers in the beat, you have the opportunity to rip off your mask and relax into the rhythm of connection. Sweat will melt your defenses away. Rhythms shatter one’s need to judge, control, defend, push, blame. In the fleeting energy of the moment there is only the dance
When you disappear in the dance, you lose all self-consciousness. You don’t worry about how you look – if you’re graceful or dumpy, fat or skinny, smiling or grimacing-all these superficial ego concerns dissolve. They’re all illusions anyway. When you dance until there’s nothing left but the dance, it is as if a door has been flung open; with one gentle push you fall into love, into the big, badass beat of the universe.” From “Connections”
