I was born in a Levantine Lebanese conservative village. Like many girls my age, I grew up to feel shame and fear towards my body. To compensate for rejecting my body, I focussed my attention on my mind.?
As a UX researcher who worked in tech companies, I was mainly surrounded by left-brain-sided engineers for whom the brain and quantitative data reigned supreme. It is fair to say that the body had no place, role, or importance at work.?
For most of my life, I operated from the neck and up. I genuinely did not know there was a science speaking about the magnificence of our bodies but also I didn’t know how to be in my body. It wasn’t until my mental health and anxiety stopped me in my tracks, that I started my journey back to finding wholeness in my mind, body, and heart and learning from the wisdom that lives in my body.?
My journey started with talk therapy which gave me the tools to navigate my life. However, it was short after that I realized that therapy alone was not enough. We are conscious beings with a subconscious mind living in a physical body. And for each dimension of us, we need different tools to tend to and heal ourselves.
At the same time I found therapy, I searched for a 5 rhythms class, and found an amazing one in Dubai. The 5 rhythms practice has shaped me and my work as much as therapy did.?
5 rhythms is a movement meditation and embodiment practice that has been created by Gabrielle Roth in the 1970s. The practice draws from indigenous and world traditions, as well as from Gestalt therapy and transpersonal psychology. 5 rhythms is a metaphor for life which is believed to move in waves, patterns as rhythms. The rhythms of the practice are flowing, staccato, chaos, lyrical, and stillness.?There are no moves to follow, everyone comes to the dancefloor and meet their own dance.
5 rhythms introduced me to the world of embodiment and more specifically to my body, and my own dance in life. At the time, talk therapy was helping me make sense of my world through words, 5 rhythms was helping me release all that was stuck in my body, and make the unconscious conscious. However, that’s not the only thing 5 rhythms has done for me or has taught me.
At a time where the world around us was falling apart, embodiment practices, took me deeper within, helped me meet myself in new ways but most importantly taught me a few lessons about the relationship of our bodies to the futures we want to live in and our ability to reimagine new possibilities for a kinder, more loving, and gentler world and future. Here are some of the lessons, I learned from dancing and being fully in my body:?
- Our bodies are the libraries of our lives: Gabrielle Roth, the founder says that between head and toes there are millions of unchartered territories. On the dance floor, I learned that trauma, stories, emotions, stress all live in my body. And one way of getting to know myself is through becoming aware of how I move my body in the world and on the dancefloor. And to heal myself, I need to work on releasing the traumas and traumatas that are living in my body. A lot of the trauma that I held in my body for years, generationally and ancestrally has been unlocked through movement. To learn more about the science of trauma and our bodies, you can read The body Keeps The Score and When the body says no.
- “How I treat my body is how I treat the world”: For the first year on the dance floor, I almost always left the class crying my eyeballs out and I never knew why. I really thought I had no significant traumas. Oh boy, I was wrong. The dance made me slowly shed layers, slowly get to know the trauma that lived in my body, but also helped me become more attuned to the subtle changes in my energy and emotions. This increased self-awareness, showed me all the times I had hated parts of myself or have not extended compassion to them. Also, in the process, I learned that how I treat others is nothing but a mirror to how I treat myself. When I hated parts of myself, I also judged others for the parts of them that triggered the wounded parts of me. If I want to participate in building a kinder world more vulnerable, I learned that I need to have the courage to be kind and vulnerable and honest with myself first so I am able to extend that kindness to others. Imagine how different the world would be if we all loved ourselves and healed our traumas, and were able to respond from a place of love, not a place of trauma and lack?. To learn more about embodiment and trauma, you can check the embodiment conference recordings for a wealth of resources from practitioners and scientists across different disciplines.
- We can practice life in safe containers:?The 5 rhythms dance floor has been a safe container for many of its dancers to practice life as it is happening and before it happens. First of all, through movement, I learned to inhabit my body and become aware of my inner and outer worlds. Through the practice, I use my body as a vessel to practice and embody different ways of being, relating, and understanding of where I stand in the world. In the past two years, I practiced how I can walk when I get stuck, how to take space when I am feeling small, how to embody clarity when I am going too much with the flow, how to be in connection with another human and with a group when I am scared to be seen and to receive love. Through 5 rhythms, I explored my edge, and my body taught me that I am more creative than I ever expected myself to be. Every time I danced and got stuck in patterns of movement, I learned how to take a step back and observe where I might be repeating the same patterns in the bigger dance floor of life. To learn more about the 5 rhythms, you can watch this video by Sylvija Tomcik embodying and explaining each rhythm.
- To create a safe world, we need to feel safe in our bodies: To be fully present in the present moment, embodied in our own bodies, we need to feel safe enough to be in our bodies. When we feel unsafe, we run away from ourselves, we numb the pain and sometimes we sabotage ourselves and others whether consciously or unconsciously. To create a safer world, it is possible that we might need to start by coming back to our own bodies. The question that stuck with me is how do we design for internal safety? To explore this topic more from a scientific perspective, you can search for how to regulate the nervous system. Lots of resources on the subject in the embodiment conference.
- To embody the future, our bodies help us explore our spaciousness: I don’t know what tomorrow holds. However, what 5 rhythms has taught me is that I can use my body to explore my own spaciousness, my own potentialities, and my own ability to shapeshift my life through the 4th rhythm of lyrical. After emptying our vessel through the third rhythm of chaos, we become ready to weave in our lessons and to expand, to open ourselves to potentialities, and get fascinated with what we never knew was possible. Our bodies are capable of expanding our own view of what is possible and feasible for us personally and collectively. How might we invite our bodies to the different ways we imagine and envision the future? To explore this subject from the perspective of social change, you can check this fascinating talk on how to embody social change personally and collectively.
- Our bodies are a compass for our future: I learned this exact terminology from Kelly Eide, a wonderful equus coach who partners with horses to help leaders hone their leadership. Our body compass is our gut feel. Kelly says, the more we get to know our bodies, the better we are capable of knowing how and when our body is saying a clear no and when it is saying a clear yes; shifting our path sometimes to directions our logical mind can’t comprehend yet. Getting intimate with my body compass, I have been thinking about how can we not just personally but collectively use our bodies to sense into our collective future. To learn more about the body compass, you can start here or check Kelly’s work.
- We co-create the future together: Whenever we are doing any 5 rhythms workshop, the teacher doesn't feel ready until everyone is present. The circle is not complete until every soul who signed up has shown up. Each experience is as different as the people who are in it. The way I journey within myself varies from when I am dancing alone to when I am dancing with a group. Collectively, we support and create the energy and the experience each and every one of us is having.?
In the past few months, I have been pulled to the idea of how the practices we practice in our personal lives, shape us, shape how we show up in the world and how we do our work. The embodiment journey that started with dance to heal my anxiety, extended to every area of my life including my embodied facilitation and research work. Wherever we are, we have a body which means whatever we do, we have access to an infinite source of wisdom that can guide us and help us navigate life.?
More importantly for me, getting into the world of embodiment, I was made aware of my responsibility and blind spots as a researcher, and to my lack of awareness of how being trauma-informed can help shape the way we perceive solving problems, co-creating solutions, and making a difference in the world and the extent of our role in that and its limitations.?
Finally, knowing what our bodies are capable of, I am hopeful that when we come back as communities to our bodies, heal our individual and collective traumas, feel safe in our own being, and love ourselves, we might have a chance at creating a kinder, more loving, and healing world and future.?
