5Rhythms® through the year
This section is is a space for dancers to share deeper experiences in a thoughtful way: very often inspirations emerge into words at odd times but insistently, and we reach for that back-of envelope when some feelening becomes thinging becomes crystalised into a justso expression.
You can Comment' (a quicker, direct route); you can write an Article. There are sections for each on this page.
We hope that everyone can contribute to this, sharing their feelings and thoughts - emotions recollected in tranquillity, as our nature-dancer Cumbrian friend Wordsworth reflected. Write when where and how you are inspired, in the spirits of your encountering and understanding the five rhythms of the dance, and your own vivacity and wisdom.
And to the 5Rhythms teachers with whom we dance: we welcome your voices also - these could potentially spark/deepen conversations and reflections from dancers.
You can directly post Comments via this page; if you have a longer reflection you would like to show as an Article, please email it to
It would be great to have the unalloyed simplicity of Chance the Gardener in the classic film 'Being There.' Wouldn't it?
No distractions; simple, deep and naïve relationship and expectation of being and life ....
Sometimes though, we get distracted – and we leave mentally and sometimes actually. Our attention 'climbs out the window'; we might become preoccupied by our brain's chattering, by self-consciousness, embarrassment, a thought, an emotion – and we leave and stop.
There are always convenient distractions, a beautiful sunset through the window, an absorbing thought, the call of tiredness to go lie down, a door to the kitchen or garden maybe open to let in the coolness. Swimmers in the community swimming pool. 'That' thought.
What to do?
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 ...
- the day after the night before -Rachel Kurtz, Saturday 7th May
If you're old enough you might remember the Vogons saying that in Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy. If not, and you're curious, you can find out about Vogons here. Resistance to Vogon capture is understandable but often we resist things that are in our own interests. Resisting nourishing practices does not serve us and brings us closer to a Vogon-esk existence of monotony and loss of perspective. This type of resistance is best dismantled.
I have been dancing 5 Rhythms since winter solstice 1997 - that will be 25 years this winter - and I can still be blind to how easy it is to get in my own way. Then my resistance was suspicion and my own insecurities. I had seen Gordon and Joy who led the local 5 Rhythms group, many times around Whitley Bay but had never spoken to them. I was projecting all sorts of things onto them that I felt I wasn’t - cool, confident, unconcerned by other people’s judgements and I was intimidated by this.
It was my first 5 Rhythms.
I wasn’t sure how my 73 year old body could handle it, nor my introverted personality.
I felt instantly safe in the room - damn cold but it soon warmed up (and how, didn't need heating after a while).
The whole process felt so natural…a return to childhood in a sense when I wanted to dance freely but of course in those days ‘not allowed’.
It was a deeply spiritual experience, full of insights, connection to Source and insights into self - those stuck places, old hurts, place of freedom.
(I wrote this after a Dance group in Bologna with Olivia Palmer)
I was touched by Olivia's reference to ‘the challenge of stillness’, and also have noticed the ‘lying on the floor’ trait in some dance groups. I’ve puzzled before about it, and after Olivia's comment, this is what I thought:
One of the complexities lies in the word ‘stillness’ in English; others lie in the idea of ‘still mediation’ and stilling the body to complete passivity, for other meditative/connective reasons.
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