“The 5Rhythms 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
Flowing is a magnet for my embodiment. My body undulates absorbing the attention I’m giving it. It twines in gratitude for my coming back home. As I go through each body part, I pass through my own lack of presence, boredom, cobwebs, and rusty places. The light of awareness is soft and strong, it never asks ‘where have you been?’ it flows full of the present moment connecting that which cannot really be separated. It connects my breath with my body, my spirit with the dance. I awaken inside and yes, life goes on and I surrender my feet to it, while it constantly weaves looking for empty space, sniffing out and discovering the path that I was born to dance.
Staccato is a defibrillator for my expression. Using words and actions that emerge from my heart, my ‘power plant’, I change things inside me and outside of me. Each encounter with the other has its rhythm, its tempo. Sometimes it’s a risk to slow down, sometimes to speed up, to come closer or to move off. Oh, rhythm – you are in my thoughts, you are in my blood. Rhythm – oh, captain, my captain! I like it when the rhythm leads and directs me, when it changes tempo and directions. I like its clarity and simplicity. The beat of the drum and the pause between the beats. I need both for music, for the dance, for life. The beat causes the pause, the pause calls for the beat, their connection is tense, sometimes at the very edge. Dancing at that edge awakens me and brings me clarity.
Chaos is a catalyst for my freedom and a softener in the midst of change. I didn’t even know that I was afraid of falling into unpredictable depths of first the darkness and then the light because deep inside I knew that this time I would find my truth and in it my intuition; my pain and in it my freedom. The thin line between white and black, feminine and masculine, left and right begins to vibrate and I begin to shake. I don’t have to choose. I don’t have to decide. I don’t have to be this or that. I can be both this and that. I can be that which is created when the plus and the minus wildly merge. As I surrender to rising up from the ashes of burnt down plans and explanations, my own and those of others, I discover a new source of energy. I discover the indestructible, self-regenerating part of me.
Once I manage to get to the other side, the other side of the street, which is almost always bathed in sunshine, when I win by surrendering, things look comical really. Things that had seemed impossible in the beginning are already underway. I realise that I can ask somebody for help with things that seemed difficult, even too difficult, although they are not easy. That which I thought would never be over and never end, passes like everything else in its own time and in its own way, naturally, by itself. A ray of sunlight behind a cloud, a flower growing from a crack in the pavement, the touch of our hands and souls in passing, beauty expanding in its vulnerability, a song I hear for the first time having known it for ages, the sense of belonging without any effort. Lyrical is the champagne of my innocence.
The closer I get to the end, the more wisdom that only comes from the experience of what was lived and gone through, grows from the very centre of my being and expands. I pray that this wisdom acts as alchemy and radiates compassion. I pray that the love I’m breathing now crystallizes into random acts of kindness. I pray that I can live this as I can dance it. At the very end there is something that deserves much more attention, like the end credits of a movie. It is here at the very end, where the ending bites the tail of the beginning, that the essence awaits – Stillness, the rhythm of moving in being still, a gong for my existence.