Often when people ask me what I do it is hard to distill into one sentence what dance is and can be for me and people I work with.

There are many layers of gifts of the dance. On one hand every physical activity, especially if we pay it due attention and do it in a certain pleasurable context, brings enhances our well-being not only on a physical level but also on a psychological. Often we can hear people saying they go to the gym to work out the stress, or they go running to reset, or they do yoga to relax their mind…

Our being likes to move. Our body needs movement to stay healthy. But not just our body. Our heart needs expression and connection to be strong and nourished. Our mind needs emptying, deconstruction and intertwining to stay open for learning and creative and to keep the healthy dynamics of focusing and resolving. Our soul needs reflection and recognition, art and sharing to maintain the healthy glow and have space to spread its wings. Our spirit, in which we are all one, needs the moments in which we  dissolve from our uniqueness into the unity and remind ourselves of the Source.

What makes dance special for me is that it covers a big spectrum of diverse needs. Physical activity with possibility of expressing something that might not fit into words, releasing the accumulated stress along with an opportunity to meet others, the artistic aspect, the inner and outer beauty, and much more than that if we allow ourselves to dive deep.

The dancing itself is already enough to bring well-being in many ways. That’s why many of us when we ere younger danced out in the clubs or at parties our broken hearts, destroyed hopes, big successes, beginnings and ends of relationships, birthdays and new years. Some of us needed support of substances to get ourselves moving, for some the music was enough, and some didn’t even need that 😉

What distinguishes a conscious dance floor from the club one, and what deepens the level of relief and healing a dance can bring is the component of consciousness. Already by becoming aware of our body, emotions and thoughts, and weaving those three aspects of our being into one dance brings deep cleansing, release and even healing. For some of us just allowing ourselves the freedom of uncensored dance can be profoundly healing. When we bring our attention closer to ourselves we stop being puppets thrashed around by the forces of the outside field. When we begin to peal off the masks we carry, beacause the dance stops being a way to attract other people’s attention and starts being a way to deepen our own, the door to inner landscape open and we can allow and activate the intrinsic wisdom of body to move and energize the empty places and release the accumulated and stuck energies from tense ones.

Even though this releasing and redistribution of energy is desperately necessary work, it is only a surface layer. Those empty and tense places appear because of knots in our inner structure as a result of our experiences, beliefs and capacities. So once we come off the dance floor back into our everyday routine stress tends to accumulate in the same old spots, just like our energy is drained from the other familiar places. So the next layer of our work is unraveling those knots so that our inner structure can be more smooth and stable. And we need more than dancing stuff our of our system to get there. That is what is called personal growth.

Dance can be one of the tools as we step further down the path, but we need others as well. This is the value of a practice and maps, or  gateways it offers into our inner landscape. When we add the structure of a practice on top of the freedom of movement, it can lead us down the unknown paths into the places that can be unfamiliar and sometimes at first even unpleasant, but where we can unearth our patterns of being, doing and relating that aren’t necessarily healthy or useful for our current life or our surroundings. Here is where the inner work can begin..

Often people ask me if the 5RhyhtmsTM practice is a sort of therapy. The official answer to that is – no. Yet even though 5Rhyhtms aren’t a psychothearapeutic form, they most definitely have therapeutic effect. That stems from the fact that our body reflects our whole being, and that is stores all our experiences and charges we have related to them. So the way we move through life is the way we move on the dance floor. On the dance floor we can relax the layer of functionality and just be as we are. And just as life constitutes of doing and being, leading and following, of turning in and reaching out, of relationships and roles in different communities we’re part of, of listening to our needs and attending to needs of others and responding to outside stimuli… So is the dance made of all those bits. We dance alone, with others and in a group We dance to music we like, and to music that we don’t. We dance in tune with the bigger field or totally out of sync with others. We dance through and with all 5 of the rhythms. We dance with our heart and our stories. We dance with the roles we play on the dance floor and beyond it. We dance in relationship to Divine.

In the dance we discover places of comfort and discomfort. Through sharing and teachings that practice brings, and again through dance we seek and find medicine, solutions, answers…. In the 5Rhythms practice each of the rhythms is a teacher and a medicine as much as a challenge and refuge. Sometimes just practicing the rhythms long enough without addressing a specific “issue” we notice changes in our life. For by practicing movements that are missing from our life our whole system is learning new tools and ways of being. Nevertheless we can, if we wish to, bring a certain question, theme or challenge to the dance floor and both actively seek answers, shifts and healing and integrate them through dance and meeting the others, through conversations and reflections. That is how the dance becomes a way of conscious personal growth.