
5RHYTHMS®
Dynamic Dance Movement Meditation
If you want to give birth to your true self,
you are going to have to dig deep down into that body of yours and let your soul howl.
- Gabrielle Roth
Current Offerings
What is 5Rhythms?
5Rhythms® is a movement meditation developed by Gabrielle Roth in 1970's, with deep roots in shamanic traditions, Gestalt Therapy, dance and theater.
The framework of five rhythms – Flowing, Staccato, Chaos, Lyrical, and Stillness offers a structured and accessible way for self discovery, healing, and spiritual growth. Each rhythm is a teacher of unique wisdom, opening us into the dynamic creativity and depth of being alive. Each dance is a journey into our inner terrains of body, heart, mind, soul, and spirit.
To heal is to be in wakeful relationships with all that is. The inquiry is: how can we become awake and truly alive when it is so easy to numb up, space out, disassociate, or get distracted and lost in our overwhelmed thinking mind?
I say, first we must learn how to BE PRESENT with ourselves. If we are not even here, whose life are we living or dreaming in? Our body is where the present moment lives. So, let's begin with the body.
Born in China, I was raised on a land rooted in five thousand years of tradition, a place where women’s bodies were trained to be still and small. Obedience was praised for virtue. Silence, rewarded for belonging. I learned early to fold myself into immobility, much like a bird with clipped tongue and bound wings. Dancing was a foreign language I never dreamed that I could speak.
Then one summer evening, in the redwood-scented air of the Santa Cruz mountains, I stumbled into a one-off movement class by a 5Rhythms® teacher from New York, in her long flowing flare pants. Gosh, I so regret that I didn’t get her name. When the music touched my ears, something broken open in my belly. I can’t recall how I danced. I never learned how anyway. I only remember, when the music stopped, I was soaked by the storm of my own sweat, while every inch of me lit up like a millions bright stars. For the first time, I tasted what it means to be wildly alive. I simply felt in love. Since then, dance has been my most faithful teacher. On the floor, I am human and divine in the same breath.
Over the past 15 years, I have immersed myself in many schools of healing arts and embodied awareness practices: shamanic work, conscious movement practices (5Rhythms®, Continuum®, Open Floor®, Soul Motion®), Tibetan Buddhist Somatic Meditation, Insight Meditation, Conscious Communication & Relating, to name a few. Again and again, I return to the same truth: underneath our fragmented cultural body lives a luminous, untamed being, waiting to be remembered, to return home to the web of all things.
In Traditional Chinese Medicine, healing is a conversation: herbs and elements in dynamic relationship, each dancing with the other to alchemize the most transformative power for wellbeing. This is how I practice offering my work. Whether through somatic therapy, holistic healing, or 5Rhythms®, I offer a living medicine with many ingredients for the matrix of body, heart, mind, soul, and spirit, meeting you where your channel is open.
My devotion is to share this work as a way home to our embodied luminous presence, to the inherent wholeness within, to one another, to communities, and to the generative mystery that is constantly rebirthing us, moment by moment.
In movements, everything is possible. Are you ready to dance your dance?
May all beings be happy and healthy.
May all beings be love and loved.
May all beings be truly free.
