Gabrielle Roth Quotes

In many shamanic societies, if you came to a medicine person complaining of being disheartened, dispirited, or depressed, they would ask one of four questions: "When did you stop dancing? When did you stop singing? When did you stop being enchanted by stories? When did you stop being comforted by the sweet territory of silence?

If you just set people in motion they'll heal themselves.

Where we stopped dancing, singing, being enchanted by stories, or finding comfort in silence is where we have experienced the loss of soul. Dancing, singing, storytelling, and silence are the four universal healing salves.

Compassion is a chameleon: it can wear the face of fear, anger, sadness, joy or even dispassion, depending on what's needed at the time. The compassionate Buddha has a smile in one eye and a tear in the other, and our Buddha mission is to lead people to true freedom, not to hold their hand and tell them that everything is going to be all right. In teaching, compassion means doing whatever needs to be done to get to the next phase.

Rumi: “Dancing is not rising to your feet painlessly like a whirl of dust blown about by the wind. Dancing is when you rise above both worlds, tearing your heart to pieces and giving up your soul.

When we dance, we wake up, we get down and juicy with ourselves, we have fun and forget all the heavy shit we carry around. In the dance we get real, get free, get over ourselves. Movement kicks ass. When you truly surrender to your own rhythm, you look so cool, so mysterious, so seductive— the way you deep down really want to look but don’t trust that you do.

Attachment guarantees that you will wake up every morning with a mission: to prove you are who you think you are—today. But it’s a total energy drain. you’re so busy performing a role that you miss out on the freedom to improvise, to be real rather than rehearsed.

To become a great teacher, one must become a teaching.

The only way out is through.

being entranced by the ego prevents us from feeling pain; in fact, it prevents us from feeling anything—ecstasy, grief, compassion, anger, shame, love—from feeling alive.

All healing journeys begin and end in the body.

Use the flowing rhythms to feel your fear; use staccato to feel and express anger, chaos for sadness, lyrical for joy, stillness for compassion. The rhythms catalyze each emotion and each stage of each emotion.

Maybe our fear of intimacy is rooted in our fear of the dark, especially the deep dark within, the great unknown. We perceive our inner darkness as a void, an emptiness that fills us with anxiety. We try to stuff this black hole instead of realizing that we are the black hole and that its emptiness is actually a fathomless freedom.

Life is a mysterious game: the only way to win is to surrender.

We are actors on life’s stage. Our challenge is to find the real play, and our true roles.

...the pain is not your pain but your relationship to it.

Think of one of your most memorable sexual experiences. Although often sex gets stuck in one rhythm, sometimes we ride the whole wave. Sensuous and slow, gentle and tender your energies flow together. As it heats up, your passion ignites into a pulsing staccato beat. As you lose control, moving beyond all thinking and fears, you surrender to the orgasmic rhythm of chaos. And then there’s the luscious lingering of the altered lyrical state before we settle into the afterglow, the bliss of stillness.

Essentially, fear protects, anger defends, sadness releases, joy uplifts, compassion unites. Fear is close to the surface of our self, anger is rather deeper, sadness and joy are progressively more interior, and compassion emanates from our profound center. Each is a level and a vibration of energy that needs to flow freely for us to be really engaged in the present.

Your soul is a seeker, lover and artist, shape shifting through archetypal fields of energy, between your darkness and light, your body and spirit, your heaven and hell, until you land in the sweet moment of surrender when you, as dancer, disappear in the dance.” Gabrielle Roth

Feelings are neither positive nor negative; they simply are elemental forces in our life energy with their own vibrations and functions. They are essential to our health and well-being. Essentially, fear protects, anger defends, sadness releases, joy uplifts, compassion unites. Fear is close to the surface of our self, anger is rather deeper, sadness and joy are progressively more interior, and compassion emanates from our profound center. Each is a level and a vibration of energy that needs to flow freely for us to be really engaged in the present.

One student of mine used to hold all the stress and tension in her life in her lower back. When things got really tough in her life as a high-powered business school professor and corporate consultant, her back would go into spasms. Robin would have to lie in bed for days until her spasms relaxed. As this condition kept recurring and eventually led to her being hospitalized and put in traction several times, the doctors wanted to operate. But after doing the rhythms for several months, her whole body started to loosen up. Now, whenever her back starts seizing up, she moves gently through the rhythms rather than giving in to the spasms, and the tension eventually subsides.

Energy moves in waves. Waves move in patterns. Patterns move in rhythms. A human being is just that, energy, waves, patterns, rhythms. Nothing more. Nothing less. A dance.

To swear is to pray, to make an offering of your innermost self.

Once your body surrenders to movement, your soul remembers its dance.

When awareness is grounded, we become aware of what is going on in our bodies in the space between our heads and our feet.

Love is emotional energy flowing rightly. It is the full range of emotions expressed appropriately, in the moment, honestly, directly. A lover is a child grown up.

Feelings are neither positive nor negative; they simply are elemental forces in our life energy with their own vibrations and functions. They are essential to our health and well-being. Essentially, fear protects, anger defends, sadness releases, joy uplifts, compassion unites.

Compassion means giving someone what they need, which is not always what they want.

The life blood of a relationship becomes blocked by clots of repression and denial, and our creative, life-building energy is absorbed by exhausting strategies of avoidance.

Empty the mind of all its chatter and see what’s there. This is the work of self-knowledge: to uncover your authentic self.

Teachers come and go. In each step of the process, a teacher is to be met, lessons learned, relationships completed, instincts appropriated.

Mother is the sacred teacher of this cycle. She passes on her lessons through her body by example, guidance, attitude, energy, vibration.

In vulnerability one practices the art of friendship, the art of the heart. It is an essential spiritual practice.

So our challenge is to become conscious of these rhythms, to truly experience them, to enter into them. We have to learn to know what rhythm we’re in, how to ride with it, how to shift; to sense what rhythm others are in and how the different rhythms are complementary or discordant. We need to discover what rhythm predominates in us — are we a flowing type, a chaotic type? What rhythms characterize the main people in our lives? We need to tune into the undulating rhythms of our days, our weeks, our months, our years.

past erases the future, leaving space for something real to happen. Something new.