WaveDance Cumbria

allow the dance and the dancer to softly unfold ...

As a child I was sent to ballet lessons. After ten years I had to choose between the many lures of the teenage world or continuing to spend every free hour, seven days a week, dancing someone else’s dance. I followed my curiosity and didn’t dance in a structured setting for over a decade. Instead I found freedom on the dancefloors of many nightclubs and parties, shaking out the rigidity of my training and finding an ecstasy that I had experienced only twice in all my years of ballet. Dancing was my drug and eventually it led me to 5 Rhythms. In the comparative safety of this new context, my spirituality exploded. Every time I danced, something deep and profound would happen. Whether or not I could make logical sense of these experiences, there was always something to learn. Suddenly everything seemed possible. I was energised and creatively inspired. 5 Rhythms had turned my life around. I believed that everyone could share this intensity of experience and be healed by the dance just as I was being, so I trained to teach. During the teacher training in 2000 - 2001 I learned more about the ego than anything else – my own and other people’s, so I remained apprenticed to Susannah and Ya’Acov Darling-Khan and to 5 Rhythms founder, Gabrielle Roth until her death in 2012. Becoming a teacher was like sailing in a whole new ocean! I was teaching regularly and assisted Susannah on her last two 5 Rhythms year-groups before Movement Medicine was launched. My 5 Rhythms dancing inspired the formation of the Bare Toed Dance Company with Jo Templey and Lynn Campbell, a venture that led me to become a part-time professional aerial dancer and teacher. Up to this point my dance had helped me integrate body and emotions but I felt that something was missing. I wanted to be able to cognitively understand what I intuitively practiced, and since 2012 I’ve been studying Psychology and Education at Durham University, exploring how experience is embodied, the science of how thoughts manifest in physical form. I continue to dance both alone at home, and with other teachers when I can, and the dance has become a familiar and deeply trusted lover that has held me through every joy and heartbreak for two decades. I have danced through phases of flowing, staccato and chaos, to lyrical, both in my life, and my teaching. Now I am enjoying the ease of trusting that all the pieces will fall into place as my teaching weaves together personal and professional experience, neuroscientific understanding and intuitive guidance. Creativity is still a major theme but I have discovered a gentleness and self-acceptance that my earlier dance did not know, allowing the dance and the dancer to softly unfold in their own time. I am quietly excited to discover where this may lead me as a teacher.

"So much time we spend thinking as adults in the modern world! Let’s get back to the body, feel the music and reconnect with ourselves and each other!"

"Let your heart dance, wherever you move your feet..."

Ever since the first time I arrived on the 5Rhythms dancefloor my confidence and joy for life grew. This dancefloor is the only place where I dare to be who I am. Dancing has been my healer every time I come out of or are in challenging situations of life. From the time when I was a little girl I was already moving as soon as a swinging song was heard through the speakers of our living room. So my mum decided to put me on danceclasses 'kidswing and rock 'n roll' when I was 10. From that moment I have tried out many shapes and forms of dancing...bouncing in Streetdance, straight postures in Ballroom, swaying hips in Latin and joyful feet in Swingdances. When I arrived on the dancefloor of 5Rhythms I discovered I had a great source to be creative with: my own moves, which I didn't know I had after many years of copying others. As a 5Rhythms dance teacher in training I will be able to help others move freely in a bigger space than their living room, with their own creative self.

I meditated, sitting on a cushion, for many years, and still do. But it was 5 Rhythms that convinced me that I needed to get into my body for real integration and sustainable transformation to happen. I continue to dance because I continue to discover new levels of understanding and new ways of moving the process of my life. I dance for the sake of endless creativity, play, freedom and connection with others. I trust deeply in the process of dancing the rhythms. I rarely know where that process is taking me, but it's always somewhere interesting. It seems to have led me to the path of teaching...who knew!

"I teach how I would like to be taught: with passion, presence and integrity. Come and join me as I share the deep and infinite teachings of this beloved practice."

Thank you 5Rhythms: what a blessed way to manifest my committment to the present moment. What other meditation practice offers me the deep satisfaction that comes from answering YES to my soul's longing to open to all the profound growth that comes from exploring my dynamic relationship to myself, the other and the whole? And what a blessing to do so without any invitation for the ego to be driving the show. My satisfaction to truly seek is fulfilled the moment I step on the dance floor. And I don't have to define my seek anymore. The dance takes care of that. I no longer have to define myself anymore. The Dance takes care of that too. My fears, rage, sorrows and of course joys all have a place where they are welcomed. What childhood offers that? Where else can I get to exercise my ever-growing authority, to truly own my responses to what comes to me in each dynamic moment? I get to trust my intuition, to say yes to however my body and heart are in each moment. And what joy to have the opportunity to share the countless teachings that come to me on the dance floor with my beloved students. The Dance will always be my oasis, my gateway to be truly alive to every moment of this sacred life. My gratitude is limitless and constant.

"How do we live? How do we heal? How do we better serve those around us? How do we love? How do we rest more often in the arms of Spirit?"

Andrew has been teaching the 5 Rhythms for nearly twenty years. He studied extensively with Gabrielle Roth, and runs workshops in many countries. For twenty years he also worked as a theatre director, and his workshop The Holy Actor, which combines the embodied aliveness of the dance with the transforming freedom of improvised theatre, has become one of the classic workshops of the 5 Rhythms programme. He lives in England with his partner Sharon and family. Andrew teaches with precise subtlety, imperceptibly guiding you deep, without fuss. His gentle compassion creates a safe space in which transformation can happen. He works with a light touch, and an embodied intelligence, bringing great delight to the spiritual practice he loves.

"What if you risk a little more? What if you push a little less? what if it's all just about discovering...."

Who am I...today? Today I am a passionate heart, a woman and a seeker. I am fire and water, wind and earth. I am chaos and flowing, I am a lyrical, travelling soul. Forever searching, through the movement of my body, the balance between my strenght and my vulnerability. On the dancefloor I seek, explore, express and create my own true version of love, family, relationship, success and any idea has been taught us but doesn't fit us any longer. Dancing is the most fascinating and poetic way to connect to that truth, to wave and struggle for that, to encourage that and celebrate it. To meet with other seekers and feel finally one. I am willing now to offer my own way of surfing these waves of life to other dancers out there and to all those who still don't know they are.

I started dancing the Rhythms in 1999; love at first sight! The podgy child who had been put out of ballet class because she couldn't do the splits had at last found a place where she was allowed - encouraged, even - to dance! And her two left feet were given the freedom to do whatever they wanted to do - which was to dance her into a sense of freedom in her whole life. I trained to teach the Rhythms with Gabrielle Roth in 2010-11, after a lifetime of teaching in mainstream education. I have also trained in counselling skills and spiritual healing, and am an Associate Member of the Association for Coaching. My teaching is also informed by my personal practice of Authentic Movement and of the Gyrotonic Expansion System. For me, the Rhythms bring together my joy in dance and music, with my commitment to personal growth, and weave all of these elements into a pathway to deep transformation. A potent alchemy indeed.

I dance because I love the freedom, truth and wakefulness I find through movement, the sense of connection to all that I am, to others and to life itself. When I teach I offer my love of dance and enthusiasm for this practice. I have been dancing since 1991 and trained in 1994. My training continues, during 2005 I studied the Heartbeat map with Gabrielle (the founder of this practice), focusing on working with emotional energy. I have practiced Tantra for more than 10 years and bring the awareness of sexual energy to my work.

"Dance, especially when you don't feel like it. The gifts of awakened consciousness are likely to find you then!"

The Dance Floor: a gift. A place to learn how to be myself with honesty and no apology. Where I can learn to dance big and small, sometimes to lead and sometimes to follow, where I can meet others in that same honest place. Together we learn the essential skills of movement, spontanteity, and how to pay attention. The Rhythms themselves teach us everything we need to know. The Dance Floor is our classroom, our daily  life the arena in which we reap the benefit of our dancing efforts.

I first danced 5Rhythms at Findhorn, Scotland in 2008. I've been dancing on at least a weekly basis since 2012, in addition to being part of a range of ongoing groups.

I participated in the 5 day Cycles in Cologne Germany, November 2015, my first experience of dancing with Jonathan Horan. My 5Rhythms Mentor Teacher is Francis Michael Eliot.

I have been supporting Francis as his crew for around 4 years at the Monday night Hebden Bridge 5 Rhythms class, West Yorkshire. Over a 17 month period, March 2014 to July 2015, we welcomed 109 dancing individuals to the class in this small town, including 20 newcomers! As a 5Rhythms Spaceholder I ensured that 5Rhythms was available week by week in Hebden Bridge, providing cover for Francis when he was not available. I  "hold the space" for dancers, demonstrating a 5Rhythms wave, and enabling dancers to experience for themselves the 5Rhythms of Flowing, Staccato, Chaos, Lyrical and Stillness.

2016 saw me establish a small business, Dance Free, as a means to take my service out into the wider community. In 2017 I established a new 5Rhythms class in Mytholmroyd, West Yorkshire.