The Power of Dance

Gabrielle Roth, the passionate creator of the famed 5Rhythms® dance and movement method, once said: “If you just set people in motion, they’ll heal themselves.”

And the environment and the people around them, one could add. To be sure, there’s an undeniable uprising of energy that takes place when individuals come together in dance.

A groovy disco beat has spurred most of us onto the dance floor during a wedding reception but in a workshop setting, the kinetic force of communal dancing is even more palpable, especially at Esalen, where dozens of movement workshops and experiential programs are offered throughout the year.

“Dance and movement are unique because no matter how you identify, what God you bow to, or what language you speak, when we move, we are one,” says Esalen faculty Lucia Horan, who’s been teaching the 5Rhythms® for more than 20 years and facilitates a variety of workshops annually.

“The language of movement leads us to information about one another as we see joy, grief, fear and anger held in the structure of our bones. Even if you don't speak the same language, when you dance together there is a shared understanding. It’s here we can meet and make sense of the importance of unity in ourselves and the world.”

Lucia’s lifelong connection to dance and her ties to Big Sur are unique. She was born into a family of the 5Rhythms® and raised in the Esalen community. She was introduced to Gabrielle Roth by her mother, Esalen faculty Peggy Horan, when she was a child and witnessed the incredible connections that take place when people gather through movement.

“Growing up, dance was a part of my culture and it was alive with music and drums and drum makers,” Lucia muses. “I learned that with dance, the sum of the whole is more than its parts. There’s something about all of these people in their full expression of themselves, individually and then collectively, which allows for something else to happen.

“Esalen has always been a place of investigation and asking the most challenging and mysterious questions, and Gabrielle was a mystic in her own right. She was asking the question through the body. She was really investigating through the movement.”

In addition to that indelible connection one can experience with others through dance, Lucia says it can also allow us to navigate through a myriad cycles and patterns of our physical and emotional reality, such as loss and grief.

She credits Gabrielle for having realized how there were different ways to create an integrative healing experience, and that dance was chief amongst them because it addressed the physical, mental, intellectual, spiritual and emotional aspects of ourselves.

But Gabrielle, whom Lucia lovingly refers to as the Grandmother of Conscious Dance Movement of our times, also believed that there was a stability that the practice of mindfulness and movement offers us that psychedelics and different intoxicants really could not.

“Gabrielle pioneered the idea of removing all of those outside influences to dive deeply inward and ask: ‘Let’s see what kind of altered states we can get into,’” Lucia says. “She saw that in the collective whole, that there was something very powerful. She recognized that we are all people of the Earth and all of our people have danced throughout the history of time.

“It’s only been in recent generations that we have been divorced from movement and the empowerment of movement. But Gabrielle said, ‘Let’s investigate this together.’ I believe there’s great power in that.”