The Dance of Life

THE DANCE OF LIFE
with Gabrielle Roth

"To sweat is to pray, to make an offering of your innermost self, to create your own prayer beads. Sweat is holy water, pearls of liquid that release your past, anointing all your parts in a baptism by fire. Sweat burns karma, purifying body and soul; sweat is an ancient, universal form of self-healing, whether done in the gym, sauna or the sweat lodge. I do it on the dance floor. The more you dance, the more you sweat. The more you sweat, the more you pray. The more you pray, the closer you come to ecstasy."

These are the words of Gabrielle Roth, an internationally known artist whose workshops at Esalen Institute and The Moving Center have helped thousands free their bodies and explore their capacity for ecstasy. She cofounded Raven Recordings with her husband, Robert Ansell, and is the author of the bestseller Maps to Ecstasy: Teachings of an Urban Shaman and Sweat Your Prayers: Movement as Spiritual Practice.

MICHAEL TOMS: There's a term you use in the book, Sweat Your Prayers, what you called "the silver desert." Can you tell us about the silver desert?
GABRIELLE ROTH: I first came to the silver desert when I was seven years old, and I was with an elderly woman who died. In that process of sitting with her, reading while she died, I literally saw energy leaving the top of her head. My own being, in some way, followed it, and it took me into a space within myself that I can only describe as a silver desert. It was a shift in my consciousness, where everything was on a vibratory level. It was a brilliant silver, light color. That was my first induction into the silver-desert consciousness. I later used to go in and out of there through trance dancing-it's a place of ecstasy, of total bliss. It's an inner place, and yet we have to go down the spiral staircase to get there. We have to wind down; we have to dance down; we have to release into that space, shift into that space. I've spent my life sorting out how to do that.

MT: We're in a time when books about the soul have reached the bestseller lists, indicating that there's an innate wanting to touch the soul, people are wanting to have meaning and purpose in their life and in their work. It seems to me, from your perspective and from your work, that you really feel that the soul is deeply rooted in the body and the movement of the body. Would you talk about the connection of the soul and the body?
GR: There is the body of the soul, the heart of the soul, the mind of the soul. When all three of these are unified you have the true power of the soul. In our ordinary lives, sometimes we'll be sitting around, and we'll be stuffing ourselves with food, and feeling angry, and yet we hear ourselves say, "No, that didn't bother me, no, not at all, nothing, no. It's OK, I'm over it, it's nothing." And so we have these three things going on. One is the defense mechanism that we've used, perhaps that's eating, or maybe we're sitting there smoking a pack of cigarettes, or guzzling something, or into a super-talk mode. We each have ways of escaping.
Then we have the feeling zone and the thinking zone. When these three energy fields are all moving separately from each other, that's the ego. It's as if you've got these different characters going on inside of you. You feel like there's a crowd scene inside of your own head, and inside of your own body.
Any spiritual work is about bringing these forces, these fields of energy-the physical field, the emotional field, and the mental field-into unity, into oneness. How does that happen? It happens through the breath. The breath is the spirit, the Holy Spirit. The breath is the catalyst. The breath shakes things up and moves things. It keeps things moving. The difference between life and death is breath. A dead body doesn't move; that's it. Conversely, then, a live body, a living body, would move fully. Every little cell would be alive and vibrating. I consider that we're a series of vibrations; we're pure energy. When we're plugged into the master current, to the big current, to the master vibe, it's held together by an invisible force called breath. So we want to make more and more space for our breath. The deeper you breathe, the more fully you're alive.

MT: Looking at how the body works, as we breathe we take in oxygen, and that oxygen filters through the entire body, through every little cell. If it doesn't get to those cells, that part of the body will have problems.
GR:I have spent the last forty years on a variety of dance floors all over the world, and I hear the same mantra coming from me, which is "Breathe, breathe." When I look around, I see people holding their breath. We breathe on a very shallow level. Why is that? Because we're afraid; because if we were to let the breath go all the way down to the toes, on the way down it would get into the hips, and then we would be forced to really feel our sensuality and our sexuality, and it would ignite these forces, and we would have to be responsible for them, channeling them, and dealing with them.
On the way down it would also pass through the whole emotional place, and we would really feel. Our feelings would start to move. I've seen it again and again in the dance-- more you dance, the more deeply you start to feel. And the more deeply you feel, the more aware you become of why you're feeling, and what those feelings are connected to. And they're always connected to relationship-relationship to the self, to each other or to the world. To breathe fully is to be alive and awake.
I think that we have some unspoken contract that we're just going to go through the motions in some kind of numb zone-like nice, normal, neutral neurotics-and just get our five gold stars at the end. We hope the Dalai Lama's right-we hope we get to come back again, and maybe next time we'll breathe, and maybe next time we'll dance, and maybe next time we will really feel the full force of the Holy Spirit. I say hey, let's go now! It's never too late.

MT: Speaking about it never being too late, the prevalent attitude in our culture seems to be that movement is limited or proscribed for those within a certain age bracket, and becomes less appropriate as you get older. What about that?
GR: In the book I tell the story of Evelyn, who's one of my dearest students. She came to an Esalen workshop when she was sixty-four. Her body was riddled with arthritis, and she was coming close to her retirement as a nursing teacher. The workshop happened to be one that was filled with lots of young, hot, single, sweat-your-prayer type people, and there she was, huddled in the corner like a little silver origami bird. I went over to see if she was OK. She was. She told me that she had come from a fundamental Christian background and that she'd never been allowed to dance.
She did whatever she could do, and then she ended up staying another five days. Now Evelyn is seventy-five. She's doing my teacher training; she teaches other seniors; she goes to class twice a week. She's a revered elder, and living proof that it's never too late to start dancing. She dropped a lot of weight-both emotionally and physically-and she has become wilder and more youthful.
Dance is infectious, and there is no time limit on it. We have very young people who are just entering their teens, and then we have elders-and everything in-between. We all dance together, we all celebrate together, and we all realize that each of the life cycles has its own sacred teachings. Each of us in that life cycle has certain teachings that we're bringing through, and certain struggles that we're working with. We can all learn from each other. It's quite beautiful.