Embrace your Dance, Embrace your Life

I went to a 5 Rhythms[1](5R) retreat over the weekend.  If you’re unfamiliar with 5R, it is an organization devoted to freedom, utilizing dance. As with all sacred work, the 5R container is carefully crafted to invite, invoke, ignite, inspire… mind, body and spirit.

5R uses music to tap into resonances that live through all human beings, but often get blocked, denied, ignored, numbed, or stuck. Different words can be used to explain the resonances but in the 5R world they are named as “Flow, Staccato, Chaos, Lyrical and Stillness.”

Just as all emotions are crucial to know the expression of wholeness, all rhythms are important in the human journey of embodiment. They all have their time and place, depending on the contextual moment of an individual. There is no “wrong” rhythm, or “bad” rhythm. Phew!

If you’ve read my posts before, you might be seeing how this practice aligns so much with what is already woven throughout my life.

• • Deeply inherent in this practice (and my life) is the movement away from the dominant narrative that is rule bound, controlling and linear, to the transformative narrative which values inclusion of expression, both/and perspectives, and connection.[2]

• • There is a focus on embodiment- of allowing what is, to be felt, expressed, and honored. Another way of saying this- it is deeply livening.

• • There is an honoring of the human experience, in all its flavors: hard, soft, contracted, spacious, rigid, flowing, contracted and divine-and so much more.

• • 5R is a kinesthetic practice – I love involving my body in conscious engagement!

• • Sacred space is important in this practice. We are waking up in the collective, uniquely. Safety, trust and love are inherent.

• • The practice is rooted in simplifying, connecting with the ordinary and practical (which time is often profound), and being in direct experience. Too often we are distracted by the conceptual mind, and what is literally right here and now is disguised.

• • Empowering the participants is a primary focus. Participants follow what feels right for them and are not forced or required to participate in any particular kind of way. No agenda. No fixing. In that space of no agenda, worlds open up, and what hadn’t been seen, comes into view… what hadn’t taken form, finds wholeness in being.

Gifts of the Rhythms 

My life is set up to support me in connecting with my un/subconscious- habits, conditioning, patterning, strategies, and so on that may exist outside of my attention. This practice is similar, in that by exploring the different rhythms I one may connect below the surface level into those subtle layers of uncharted territories.

Flow

Take Flow, for example- the first of the 5 rhythms. Flow energy is that kind of adaptable, fluidity that can be considered a feminine energy. Think of how a woman’s hips can move with a certain kind of expression that may not be as innate in men. In the dance it is distinguished as flowing, continuous movements.  In my life, I’ve often had too much of an ability to flow- or adapt. As a survivor, it became a strategy to adapt to those around me- to become who they wanted me to be, or to try to be a certain kind of someone- so as to avoid rejection or abandonment. As a young person, I learned to adapt to stay safe, but then later in life that adapting no longer kept me safe. Too much fluidity made me ripe for abusive dynamics when I was an adult. To help shift that conditioning, I’ve needed to learn about and to employ staccato energy in my life.

Staccato

Staccato energy is another of the rhythms. It is more of a masculine energy by nature, and can be distinguished by more rigid movements in the dance. Staccato energy teaches us how to have healthy boundaries, to stay true to our own wisdom even when it feels risky, and to stay in the simple clarity of Love. This is a resonance that I lived most of my life without. It has been extremely empowering to discover this energy- and to know that I can be fully open in my heart, connected with Love, while having boundaries.

There was one paired exercise where we were invited to be in staccato energy while staying in our open hearts. I so appreciated being able to engage in this in such a kinesthetic, full-bodied way.  Too often the mind is trying to manage us into a homogenous experience. “I need to say YES to everything to be a loving individual!” As such we get caught in a trap. The mind says that if we have boundaries, or say no, it must mean we’re not being loving. Although it may be the belief, this is simply not true. With practice, we can discover that we can say no, set a clear boundary, AND be open hearted. Embodying paradoxes is powerful!

Chaos

Another powerful experience was being in the rhythm of Chaos. As the name might give away, chaos can be rather whirlwinds. For survivors, we often detest this energy because it was the energy of our childhood. And yet because we dislike it so much, we wind up creating or being involved with dramatic (and traumatic) lives and people because of our inability to have boundaries. In the chaotic rhythm we learn that we can have both flow AND boundaries. We learn that it is safe to be in chaos, out of strategy, and in the disruption of old patterning. We learn that in life there is a creative flow that awaits our participation- if we can open to it, it is ours!!!

Many times the chaos rhythm took me towards immense states of freedom- old ideas of myself falling away effortlessly as more of me was available to the expansive energy of the creative field.

Lyrical and Stillness

Dancing through chaos, I fell into the rhythm of Lyrical, where a sense of space opens up for integration, and a sense of lightness emerges. And then finally, into the rhythm of Stillness, where completion reveals itself in slow, if not motionless, expression.

Many times, on the other side of Chaos, I found myself in an awe inspired ecstasy with God- in a union with the utter vastness of grand design. Tears falling down my face, in the holiest of the holy- in the Magnificence itself.

Another paradox revealed itself to me through the weekend. While Stillness does have it’s own rhythm in the practice of 5R, stillness also can be maintained throughout all of the other rhythms. I remember one times, in the energy of Staccato, where I was connecting to anger and rage, there was a sense of stillness running through me at the very same time. Said another way, it became clear to me that Love/God co-exists with everything. EV.ER.Y.TH.ING. The embodiment of paradoxes is profoundly transformative.

Embrace your Dance, Embrace your Life 

Over the course of the weekend we were summoned to engage with the energetic resonances that live deep within our being. This is no small task, but it is a task that we choose to fall into, with guidance, support and love[3].

Although it may seem like it, this isn’t an advertisement for 5R. This blog post is about the celebration of life as a human being- and the dances we engage in. I invite you to engage in your humanity in whatever way allows you to dance, metaphorically or literally, with your humanity.

I invite you to know the expressions, or rhythms, of your human self, and to experiment in and with them, with conscious curiosity. Many of you do this with me in 1:1 sessions, in trainings, in gatherings, and/or in deepening courses. I look forward to our continued dance, in deep courage, compassion, and love.

[1]https://www.5rhythms.com

[2]I wrote about the dominant/transformative narratives here.

[3]Thanks to Visudha de los Santos(and David Watters for brining 5R to Bloomington).