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If you have items for future meetings, please submit an Agenda Proposal Form so you can add your concerns to the agenda prior to the actual meeting.

In order to have productive meetings, please inform yourself of past consensus decisions reached by reviewing the minutes of previous Community & Executive Committee meetings. They are posted in the archive on this page.

Embodydance & 5Rhythms® Practice

Some History And Science

A common ritual practice of both Native and African American cultures—and all shamanic cultures on earth—is their use of transformational dance to touch the Other that exists beyond consensus reality. Within these sacred dance rituals are all the elements necessary for the transcendent experience: dance (energy building), drumming (clearing the mind), […] and sounds and chants as a vehicle for healing and as a doorway into the realm of the spirit. In combination, these elements transport participants into an alternate reality where it is possible to quiet the mind and simultaneously elevate our life energy to the degree that we can solve (seemingly) unsolvable problems, heal chronic disease, and achieve heightened perception. Dance rituals are one of the most transformational tools available within both eastern and western spiritual cultures.—Wilbert Alix, transedance.com

Typical shamanic entrainment technology may include drums, chants, music, strobe lights, chimes, audio pulses, and talk routines which guide the ritual participants into a shared trance. Native American peyote rituals use the beat of a medicine drum as the synchronous driver for the baseline trance, and then layer that with vocal drones to create resonant drivers which maximize brain wave amplitude and global coherence in the group circuit. Discussion of periodic resonant oscillators and entrainment is essentially a physics-based deconstruction of music’s power to induce and lock targeted mind states, which is something we all instinctively understand from the experience of listening to music […] when the mind is entranced by an entrainment technology such as music, the mind and the music merge from separate individual oscillators into a standing harmonic interference pattern with its own unique properties. The mathematical implication of this is interesting enough, but the physical implication is more intriguing; music and mind spontaneously couple.
—http://psychedelic-information-theory.com/Hypnotic-Entrainment-and-Induced-Trance-States

What Isn’t Embodydance?

First, let’s set the record straight. We are not a 5Rhythms® dance community. 5Rhythms® is a business that codified and defined the form of the community trance-dance and entrainment technology that has been practiced since the beginning of time. Gabrielle Roth, the founder of 5Rhythms® practice, gave names to the movements of transformation that are encompassed in any sacred dance and has led countless people to personal transformation through her workshops and performances, which grew out of her early experience as a ritual creator and actor in New York. We are deeply indebted to her work.

What IS Embodydance?

Within a sacred container, created by the facilitator for the evening, we dance to a program of music that emulates the bell-curve waveform of all sacred dance, sacred ritual, sexual intercourse, and even roller-coasters.

How Are We Different From The 5Rhythms® Practice?

First and foremost, we do not teach. We observe silence on the dance-floor and our facilitators do not speak during the bell-curve of the dance. The philosophy of Embodydance is that your body already knows how it wants to move and we encourage you to listen to your body as it responds to the facilitator’s musical program prepared for that evening. In listening, find where your body resists, and dance into that resistance. Let your “mind spontaneously couple” with the music. A simple way of stating our philosophy is "Shut up and dance!"

Also, we are not a business. We do not certify teachers through a costly training program that allows them to start a new 5Rhythms® business of their own. We are a non-profit, community-owned and community- operated organization, and we have been dancing at least twice a week for over 11 years. As such we are a stable and welcoming community of core members, many of whom have been dancing with Embodydance from the very beginning, as opposed to an ad-hoc gathering of dancers who decide to attend a class that evening. We are in a very real sense a family; we have experienced births, deaths, marriages, and divorces within our community. And we have kept showing up and dancing through it all.

However…we believe that 5Rhythms® workshops can inform your dance and can help you move into a place where you can gain maximum benefit from our community, by helping you break through barriers that you may find are personal “sticking places” for you.