At a dinner gathering once, I seated my childhood friend Perry next to my Mentor-in-Chief, Gabrielle Roth, whom he had never met. Gabrielle’s husband, Robert Ansell, was sitting at the end of the table. Perry later told me that he had been very uncomfortable talking to Gabrielle, because “She was looking at me in a way that only lovers have looked at me, and her husband was sitting right there.”
“Oh,” I responded, “that’s how she looks at everyone.”
It was true. Gabrielle had a razor-sharp, penetrating vision of each person she encountered, and saw everyone as a lover, a soul, a magical spirit; an artist, a dancer, a poet; an innocent child and a person of great hidden power and mystery. She had a natural ability to pierce through false veneers of personality, social formalities and layers of self-protection and fear, straight through to the heart of people; to the heart of me.
The very moment I looked into Gabrielle’s eyes in January 1979 at the East-West Center in Greenwich Village, New York, I experienced a deep and profound recognition within me that there was nowhere to hide, and no need to hide. The extremely private “me” that I generally censored and concealed from the world, I would learn, was the very part of me that Gabrielle both elicited and celebrated. And that ability to see into a person’s soul was a gift she would eventually share with thousands and thousands of people around the world, each of whom, like me, felt seen in their very core. Even without ever doing her work, people who met her were seduced by the electricity of her simple presence. Like an “urban shaman,” a moniker she preferred to distance herself from, her Being itself served as a catalyst for others. And what precisely did she catalyze? In a word, movement. Movement of the body, the psyche, the spirit. In her words,
Movement is my medicine, my meditation, my metaphor and my method, a living language we can rely upon to tell us the truth about who we are, who we are with, and where we are going. There is no dogma in the dance.
While she also used theater, music and the written word, her central tool was the 5Rhythms™ worldwide movement practice, to which she devoted most of her life. She called upon the 5Rhythms to physically launch people’s bodies into motion, but in service to their souls.
Set the body in motion and the psyche will heal itself.
It was clear to her that most of us, most of the time, are unconsciously locked into very predictable, safe patterns of thinking and behavior, boring habits, ancient conditioning that is etched into the very cells of our bodies and expressed in every move we make, every word out of our mouths. All of our attention, she’d point out, is generally preoccupied with the incessant “I-mail in the Chat Room” inside our heads, and that we are emotionally trapped inside wounded hearts, no longer truly able to feel. Our life stories, in her view, are a tale told by a “nice, normal, neurotic nobody,” or a “trizophrenic who thinks one thing, feels another and does a third.” And she believed in her very bones that the way out of this cage of restriction, the way to unify this utter fragmentation, quite simply, is to dance.
We dance to fall in love with the spirit in all things, to wipe out memory or transform it into moves that nobody else can make because they didn't live it. We dance to hook up to the true genius lurking behind all the bullshit—to seek refuge in our originality and our power to reinvent ourselves; to shed the past, forget the future and fall into the moment feet first.
Moving our bodies to shake ourselves free, we leap and glide, pace or pound the floor, float up down and around, step forward and back, in circles, lines and polytetrahedrons. We dance to the music and learn to make love with empty space, to dissolve time, and to consciously re-awaken our elbows and shoulders, hips, knees and fingers, to put “your mind in your feet and your body in the beat,” and ultimately, to recover the authentic choreography of our Essential Being.
After spending many years at the Esalen Institute in Big Sur, California, surrounded by countless spiritual, New Age and human potential paths, Gabrielle came to a singular conclusion:
Dance is the fastest, most direct route to the truth—not some big truth that belongs to everybody, but the get down and personal kind, the what's-happening-in-me-right-now kind of truth.
Hers was an embodied spirituality, asking each of us to literally call spirit down into our physical forms, rooted in our feet, connected to the ground, to earth, water and sky. The 5Rhythms is a moving meditation practice that lands the practitioner inside, in the empty, silent, still-point at the very center of our being, where we drop all goals and awaken to the mystery of the moment, of being full-bodied, full-breathing, sweat-soaked humans, pouring heart and soul into this one and only wild ride.
Between the head and feet of any given person is a billion miles of unexplored wilderness. The question I ask myself and everyone else is, "Do you have the discipline to be a free spirit?" Can we be free of all that binds and bends us into a shape of consciousness that has nothing to do with who we are from moment to moment, from breath to breath?
Gabrielle’s work is a multi-layered map, a medicine wheel that begins at the center with the core teachings of the 5Rhythms practice, a "wave" of five fundamental energies she termed Flow, Staccato, Chaos, Lyrical and Stillness. She observed this cycle in nature, in thunderstorms, in the act of giving birth and making love, and translated it to the dance floor, each individual rhythm containing its own teachings, archetypal metaphors and personal life lessons for the person who dives into the practice from the deep end.
From this core practice rooted in movement, the dancer moves into “Heartbeat,” the level of Gabrielle’s work that explores the often-barren emotional landscape of those of us frozen in fear, armed against our anger, wounded by a deep river of seemingly endless grief. We use the 5Rhythms to move and express these places of forgotten feeling, to the point of releasing ourselves to the possibility of experiencing the genuine joy and compassion that arises when one’s heart is finally at home in the “Unified Field” of love.
Perhaps my favorite Gabrielle quote of all time was one day, after spending hours moving and dancing and sweating, various people in the room were experiencing a range of emotions, from someone deeply sobbing in a corner to another beaming with elation, and she casually tossed off one of her classic, mind-stopping one-liners:
You didn’t really think this was about dancing, did you?
And the answer for me has always been, “No, I didn’t.” For me, the movement was merely a vehicle for releasing and letting go of whatever in me was preventing the experience of authentic and deep connection with others, soul-to-soul. For me, her work was ultimately about peeling away the layers of fear, sorrow, anger and self-protection, and landing at last in the silent, still point in the center of the soul, directly wired in to the “unified field,” which in other practices and traditions might be termed, simply, the one consciousness. Gabrielle’s 5Rhythms have the capacity to transport us to a glimpse and a visceral experience of that underlying Reality we all inhabit. Some simply call it Love.
Next in the spiral of Gabrielle’s teachings is Cycles, which again uses the 5 Rhythms as a means for individuals to deeply explore their personal stories, their narrative development from childhood through adolescence, puberty, maturity and the death cycle.
As for the self-conscious ego-dramas that we all perpetually enact on a daily basis, Gabrielle’s “Mirrors” work invites all of those voices inside our heads to speak, to come alive, to be playfully exaggerated and seen for what they are. When we first met, she literally had me reveal my inner dialogue about my sex life on a public stage, before hundreds (and on several occasions, nearly 2000) complete strangers in a weekly Ritual Theatre performance that a small group of us did in Soho, New York City, in the early ‘80s, as well as performing at New Age-type expos and conferences.
Yes, I felt exposed, yet at the same time saw that exposure is a good thing, is liberating. Masking who we really are requires a ton of energy; being ourselves is far easier and more relaxing. Gabrielle was a big fan of authenticity over the assorted social personae our egos usually adapt to appear “okay” and get by in life.
Many of us are so accustomed to this ongoing parade and charade of false characters we present to the world that we not only deceive others, we have also managed to unwittingly hide who we really are from ourselves. In Gabrielle’s theatre, a hall of mirrors, we are given the opportunity to personify and publicly reveal those interior ego characters, and give them each a name.
If, for example, I notice I am saying or doing something merely to get attention, I have learned to recognize that inner character as “Larry Look-at-Me,” taking charge and speaking through my mouth. Or often his first cousin, Sam Special, gets front and center in my life. And trust me, you really don’t want to be around me when Bitter Bob or Victor Victim is at the helm. When we performed in New York, my tendency toward melancholy was presented on stage as the ever-miserable Danny D. Presso. My friend Martha, portraying Connie Cling, would literally leap onto my body and not let go. Nearby, Gladys Gorge devoured a box of cookies center stage in under 45 seconds. All the while, Judy Judge stood on the sidelines criticizing all the other actors, and Captain Control kept marching back and forth, barking orders at everyone in the cast to do things his way.
The audience would recognize themselves in each character, laugh at themselves, and be released, for a moment at least, from the confines of lackluster personality patterns and behaviors that are mostly on automatic pilot. We the performers were likewise freed from our counterfeit, fear-based roles, able to relax into a more spacious dimension of Self that Gabrielle called “The Holy Actor,” that part of our own awareness that is not identified with any one of our ego-characters, but is an impartial witness to the whole show. (This part of her work, interestingly, was influenced by her time spent in Chile with Oscar Ichazo, and his teachings on the ancient system of the Enneagram, a way of personality-typing. Unbeknownst to us at the time, she had adapted those principles to a theatrical context.)
Gabrielle Roth passed away on October 22nd, 2012, at the age of 71, from lung cancer, and it is only now that the significance of our initial moment of connecting has finally become clear to me. Two nights after her death, looking at her photo, what should have been completely obvious for years dawned on me like a light bulb over my head: Oh my God, I did have a teacher in this life! Like Castaneda to her Don Juan, I’d always been a bit slow to grasp matters of the spirit. For clearly I had met someone who would not only be my teacher, but a lifelong friend and someone whose presence in my life and in my heart and soul was so potent, vibrant and alive, that when she died I actually felt no grief nor sensed any absence. And I am truly not a New Age type of person who says things like that! It may purely be my imagination at work, but the fact is, even for an old, hardened cynic like me, in the days following her passing, Gabrielle remained as vital a presence and mischievous, trickster spirit in my inner world as she did before, almost as if the fact of her physical disappearing act was merely incidental.
Even though after that first meeting I would continue to devote much of my life for the next 30 years to seeking out other teachers, meditating with gurus and alleged Messiahs and Avatars, traveling to ashrams in India, taking shamanic potions in the jungles of Brazil and so forth, throughout all of it, Gabrielle was the one teacher I consistently remained in touch with, would return to, would take another workshop with, or another lunch, would count on to answer my phone calls and emails, though I knew she received upwards of 700 personal messages a day. So when my last email went unanswered, I knew something was up.
***
Something was up. She was dying. Because of the thousands of people who would have bombarded her and her family with well-meaning phone calls, emails, texts, and Facebook posts, they opted to keep it quiet. So quiet, in fact, that only the week before she had sent out a cheerful email to the hundred participants from around the world who were coming to New York to take a workshop with her the following weekend. Her close friend and workshop producer Lori Saltzman called her and asked, “Uhhh, what’s with the perky email?” They both knew she couldn’t get out of bed, let alone lead a workshop. On the other hand, Gabrielle had already pulled off many surprises in her three and a half year dance with cancer. Lori reported that Gabrielle, who could barely speak, croaked in response, “It’s my retirement party.”
She never made it to the party. But those hundred people danced their hearts out, joined by nearly 10,000 people from nearly every time zone in the world, spontaneously pouring their hearts out on a dedicated Facebook page 24 hours a day, a virtual vigil, an astounding testament to the power and possibility of one courageous, daring spirit touching the lives of so many; of one person changing the world. People offered prayers, poems, memories, appreciations, photos, music, irreverent jokes. (That would be me: “In lieu of flowers, Gabrielle has asked that you make a contribution to my offshore account in the Cayman Islands.” Or, “Hey Gabrielle, I guess it would be a bit embarrassing now if you didn’t die.” She trained me to be the irreverent comic, and I wasn’t about to let her down at that point.)
If this were an obituary, I would be sure to recount Gabrielle’s life story. But far more than the facts of her biography, she was first and foremost an Artist of the Soul, an Artist of Being, an urban street shaman who devoted every ounce of her energy and passion to shedding light on the illusory and limited nature of our repetitive life stories and pumped-up resumes. So why then, would I offer up her resume here, when she’s the one who finally helped so many people recognize that who they really are is so much vaster and more mysterious than what they’ve done and where they’ve been?
To come full circle, it was her presence alone in people’s lives—in my life—along with her 5Rhythms movement work, that pushed all of us deeper into our creative power, our vital life force and originality, and the courage to express it:
She once said to me,
If you are a thousand watt bulb, don’t dim your light; let everyone else wear sunglasses.
Then I learned she said that bit to lots of her students. Sam Special would have to wait another day to be singled out. (Secretly though, between you and me, she always did make me feel special. And that’s the secret shamanic gift of such people: like my friend having dinner with her for the first time, she gazes into each pair of eyes as if they belong to the most utterly unique and mysterious creature in the known and unknown universe. Because they do.)
Gabrielle herself was a ten thousand watt blinding light, and similar to using one candle to light another, her unbridled and untamed inner flame ignited thousands of others across the globe.
Lest this sound cultish or overly-worshipful, which would annoy the hell out of her, let it be clear that I kept returning to Gabrielle’s world because it never turned cultish or weird, because she never wanted people to worship her, or be like her; she only asked that we be like us, and helped us uncover whoever that was in each individual case.
You want to dance like me? she once asked. Then dance like you.
I kept returning because she had a real and ordinary home life, a loving husband of 35 years, her beloved Robert Ansell, and a devoted son, Jonathan Horan, both fully and deeply involved in producing and teaching her work. I helped her shop for sweet potatoes and cranberry sauce at Whole Foods to prepare for her family’s Thanksgiving dinner. Such signs of ordinary domestic life are always good things to watch for in a spiritual teacher, albeit rare. And consider this: isn’t it a bit strange that being simply a real and ordinary human should even be something worth mentioning when describing a spiritual teacher, as if it is a rarified character trait instead of the very first thing to be expected? But time and again we have seen our charismatic leaders towering above us on pedestals only to inevitably topple and fall to the ground, exposed as yet another flawed human being. Gabrielle, on the other hand, started out being exposed, lived her very life from a place of being raw and nakedly herself, so there was never very far she could fall. 
And finally, I kept returning to Gabrielle because she invited me into her apartment, into her life, out to dinner, to help her over the phone at midnight with last-minute writing deadlines. I got to see her up close before she put on make-up and the sleek black outfits she loved so much. After so much disillusionment over the years with fallen spiritual teachers, she remained who she said she was; no more, no less. During one of her final radio interviews, she was asked several times to explain how the archetypal pattern of the 5Rhythms applied to the death process. She skirted the question several times until finally she simply said, “I have no idea; I haven’t died yet.” She was a lifelong devotee of the simple truth of where people really are, not some dressed up Capital T Truth of their Spiritual Fantasy Life. What’s really going on inside you, right now, and can you allow it to move and change, using your body as a tool?
And now, finally, like a parting gift, her passing made it clear to me that I did in fact receive her offering. The “Artist-me” she perceived, the edgy character she seduced forth from behind my hesitations and fear, the originality of my birthright that she celebrated, is all firmly etched in my inner view of myself, a personal model and interior identity I will forever aspire to express and be true to, hearing her urging me on from the sidelines of my soul, laughing and crying with me through the tragicomedy of my life and ongoing dramatic storyline, and through it all, beckoning me to join her in the middle of the dance floor, moving my toes and every part of me up through to the top of my head, to let the whole catastrophe go, in spontaneous motion, in a deep inward dive into the heart of the dark mystery of being alive.
