Energy Flows

“Fifteen years ago, I had a rendezvous with a half-blind Indian shaman in the Buffalo airport. As we sat in the fast-food café sipping tea, we each drew our cosmologies on paper napkins, which we then exchanged. His was ancient and had been passed down over the centuries; mine was brand new. He called his a medicine wheel; I didn’t have a name for mine, so I called it a map…

There are plenty of ways to get to the stillpoint… I get there by dancing. I remember being a wild child of the sixties, having to dance or die — letting go of everything I thought, felt, or knew to be true as some kind of jazz riff seized my bones. I spent long nights in my living room, the music at full volume, eyes half closed, making love to the beat. Swooning to the rhythm, I felt as if I’d met the ultimate lover. In ecstatic rapture, I surrendered to something old and mysterious… For me this has taken place on countless dance floors, when the music was really pumping and I stopped caring about what anybody else thought of my dance, my hairdo, my brain, or my butt. Through dancing I navigated the badlands of endless headtrips and found my way back to the stomping ground of my own two feet. Through dancing I discovered that when you put the psyche in motion, it heals itself. Since making this realization many years ago, I have become a tour guide, taking groups of people on the inner journey from inertia to ecstasy…

After a number of years of looking out at dancing bodies from my stillpoint, I began to see patterns in their movements, an infrastructure underlying all our experience, a living language. I was stunned at how all these patterns revealed themselves to me in fives, as if guided by some universal principle. From where I sat in the deep, dark emptiness, every body appeared as a star in a sky of infinite possibilities…

Eva was my first spiritual teacher, though of course I didn’t realize it until long after. I was living with my parents near Golden Gate Park in San Francisco. I’m playing with some friends in the street. We’re throwing ourselves recklessly into a large hedge on the side of a house. Suddenly an elderly woman bolts out of the house and scares away my friends. I stay, as my friends run off, mesmerized by her energy and captivated by her strangely gentle scolding, “Children, can’t you hear the leaves and branches screaming? Don’t you know they’re in pain?”

She invites me in for tea. Her eyes are blue tunnels, her hair silver. Her body is taut, slender, and her conversation is punctuated with a quick, high-pitched laugh. The house is flooded with music and the smells of soup cooking. Enchanted, I know I have found not just a new friend, but a friend for a new part of myself. We spend endless afternoons drinking tea and talking. I don’t even know that I’m learning more here than at school, because it’s all so effortless. But it’s in dying that Eva teaches me the most. I have a vision of her death during morning Mass. I go every day. I love the solitude, the stillness of the old Catholic church. Just me and a bunch of old ladies in black, rocking and rolling our rosary beads. This particular morning, as the priest serves Holy Communion, I see something moving above his head. It looks like an eagle. It looks like Eva. She’s a see-through shadow of herself, laughing so loud I’m sure the priest can hear. He doesn’t bat an eye, has no idea what’s going on, and that’s when I know she’s dying. She blows me a kiss as I fight back my tears.

I’m terrified. I don’t even go to school. I run to her house where I find her very much alive. I tell her what I’ve seen, and she speaks to me in that always surprising way of hers. She convinces me that death is not negative. I can’t focus on her words, make any logical sense of them. All I get is that death seems like an exotic recipe, a wonderful way to make a pie. Her energy begins to shift inward. Our visits are shot through with silence. Or music. Sometimes Chopin. Sometimes Frank Sinatra. Sometimes a wailing gypsy. Eva gradually moves into the bedroom. It’s a permanent move. “She’s moving in, and out,” I think. One afternoon, while reading to her, the color of the room begins to change. It slowly becomes bathed in silver. I see a thread of her silver hair extend right out of her head and turn into a thread of light that penetrates deep inside me. I bask in a silver glow, a meditation without effort, an ecstatic tranquility. I feel like I’ve floated to another level, been transported to another place. I think I’m in heaven. Eva is dead. Her spirit is gone. I close her eyes the way she told me to. And I keep reading to her. I don’t want to leave. When I do, I close the door and don’t look back. She told me not to.

Eva’s death was a beginning for me, an initiation into a fresh way of seeing life and death, a way of dissolving, at least momentarily, the boundaries between body and soul, now and forever. It was my first encounter with ecstasy. I found the Silver Desert as a child, but like most people, I lost it as I grew up. Our culture does not value or even believe in ecstasy. All too soon the soul starves…

Right from the start, I discovered that when I dance I bypass my personality. It can’t keep up. It has no sense of rhythm, because it’s like a robot, programmed to only certain patterns of movement. When I dance, I break free. I make up my own steps, let the beat all the way into my soul. I ride on the waves of music like a surfer. I bump against parts of myself, go between, around, stretch what I know. I go where I’ve never been. Through dance I’ve journeyed through my body into my heart, past my mind into another dimension of existence, a dimension I call ecstasy, total communion with the spirit. Moving with the spirit has taught me all I know. And all I know is that ecstatic movement is empowering and healing…

At the beginning of my journey, teachers came to me in all forms. My initiation began on playgrounds and senior-citizen centers. To work my way through college, I taught dance and drama to kids and old people for a variety of recreation departments. At least that’s what I thought I was doing. They were my first Zen masters. They taught me to lead by following. It was impossible to “control” 300 kids on a playground or 50 seniors, each with their own worlds and fixed ideas. It was impossible to impose my great plans — plans I may have stayed up half the night creating — unless they happened (as they occasionally did) to fit into their flow. More often than not, to retain my sanity, I had to drop my brilliant ideas and flow, spontaneously creating movement and dance out of the energy in the room or on the playground. I had to draw them out from where they were. I followed them into the moment, and found it a magical place.

It was there I first discovered the rhythms by which energy flows, by paying attention to their moves, the sudden gear shifts in intensity and style. The kids especially changed very quickly, and I had to shift with them: one minute I’d be telling stories, the next moment creating a new tag game; then I’d be explaining why two dogs were stuck together; soon I’d be umpiring a baseball game; and then a crying kid would need consoling. I had a day-after-day intensive in improvisation, intuiting just what to do in the moment, creating something special out of just a hint, an accident, a confrontation. But mostly the children and the seniors, each in their own way, inspired me just to be myself. And looking back, I realize that my real job was to keep their energy channeled in positive, creative directions.”

~ Gabrielle Roth,. Maps to Ecstasy: A Healing Journey for the Untamed Spirit
"Gabrielle Roth (1941 – 2012) was an American dancer and musician in the world music and trance dance genres, with a special interest in shamanism. She created the 5Rhythms approach to movement in the late 1970s; there are now hundreds of 5Rhythms teachers worldwide who use her approach in their work." ~ Wikpedia