Andrew Holmes encourages us to dance more!

September 1st 2022

Most of us begin dancing the 5 Rhythms with an evening..

(In the very earliest days, that wasn’t possible. There were very few teachers, and someone only came to London, where I lived, once a year.. So my first experience was a four day workshop!)

But most of us dip a toe in for a couple of hours, to see whether we like it.

And if we do, then we come back.

Evenings are easy. They don’t ask too much of our time or money.

Evenings are fun. They give us a good workout, blow away the cobwebs, connect us with others.

And they’re useful. They help to bring us back to centre, to process the ups and downs of our daily lives.

If an evening is all that you’ve tried, then you may begin to feel that you know what this dancing is about ...

 

And why would you bother doing it for a whole day, or a weekend?

(And how would you manage to keep moving for all that time??)

The truth is that the 5 Rhythms offer an extraordinary practice that can take us deep into the wholeness of our own being, and far into the aliveness and mystery of being itself.

The practice is so simple, in its essence, that we can pick up the basics in an evening.

But the power, and depth, and freedom, and beauty of it take more time to emerge.

An evening is like a chat on the phone.

A workshop like a day spent in good company.

An evening is a snack on the go.

A workshop a satisfying meal.

Or (as Rumi might put it) why settle for a glass of water, when you could become the river itself?

If you haven’t tried a day or a weekend yet, I wholeheartedly recommend it.

There’s time for our body and soul to settle in and find something new.

Our sense of the practice is greatly expanded.

We can travel further where we need to go.

And when we come back to an evening, that’s a deeper experience too ... enriched by the fuller embodiment that we’ve found.

Andrew Holmes is a full-time 5 Rhythms teacher  - he's been teaching for more than twenty years in Britain and internationally.