Making Connections

Making connections Oneness, waves and dancing

words Adam Barley photos Tammy Lynn www.tammylynn. com.uk Adam Barley has been teaching Gabrielle Roth’s 5 Rhythms® since the early 90’s, and is renowned throughout the western world for his bighearted, high-energy, transformative work. For more information see www. adambarley.com. He lives with his family in the Cotswolds, England.

Isn’t it connection that we all long for? Isn’t it what we spend most of our time chasing either directly or indirectly? The experience of moving from separation to oneness is blissful. It’s sex, it’s love, it’s coming home, and we want it. Of course there’s another part of us that’s on the run from ourselves, that would rather zone out, dumb down, disconnect from anything that makes us feel. But that’s a relatively superficial layer, even if we’ve made a long term commitment to be identified with it. In the quiet, deeper places of the heart we all long for a sense of connection, to be part of something bigger than ourselves, to be moved by life, to be touched by love.

Our collective reality has been one of disconnection for a long, long time; Newtonian physics and Darwinian ecology merely explained and cemented a world view that had its roots way back with a god that was ‘up there’, and its expression in countless generations of warfare. Millennia of violent oppression took a hatchet to the natural connection between earth and heaven, between body and spirit: where it was found it was burnt at the stake, imprisoned, tortured, exiled.

The result is a perceived reality in which I am separate from you and everything around me; God is so damn separate I’m not sure ‘he’ even exists at all, and if I’m to get what I want I’m probably going to have to fight you for it.

This is a painful reality to live in; it’s such a small truth, and small is not all that we are. This is the reality of the ego, or the left-brain. The other side of our intelligence, the right half of the brain, perceives reality completely differently. From this point of view, everything is one. There is no separation, just one unified field that we’re all part of. (If you haven’t seen the talk Jill Bolte Taylor gave on this subject, google her name and ‘stroke’. Eighteen minutes of sheer inspiration.)

This paradigm of ego, of separation, is killing us.

It’s killing our spirit as individuals, as cultures, and is reaching the point where it threatens our survival as a species. The results of this small-minded perception have become so widespread and damaging, that the time is really NOW to make a shift. We have to change. I don’t need to argue the case for that here, do I? Plenty of other more informed and better writers have gone before me

Loneliness is a phantom feeling. You’re never alone once you’ve made a connection to your mysterious, multifaceted, diamond, glow-in-thedark self.

Gabrielle Roth

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cont...

Making connections

5 Rhythms® and I’ve been studying this practice ever since; for almost twenty years. The rhythms But how??? How do we shift reality, grow our perspectives, balance our intelligence, and recover are the fastest most powerful medicine for connection I’ve found—connection to myself and other these fundamental connections that have been people—medicine for that fundamental wound so deeply severed? What can we do, as individubetween body and spirit. They have taken me to als, that would be in service to a collective shift of utter despair, rage and terror, and taught me how perspective in this direction? to access the kind of strength to get through feelFor me, my first shot was meditation. I used simple ings like that and come out the other side danctechniques I learnt from an Indian master, sitting ing, right into the most ecstatic blissful power and still for an hour a day. I definitely got connected beauty I’ve ever known. to something, touching right into the source.

Any physical movement has this effect if it’s done Beautiful. But…meanwhile my life was rolling on. with an attitude of deep awareness and openness.

I became a father, crashed my marriage, and Movement is life, and life is spirit made flesh. finished a degree realising I didn’t believe in it So when we pay attention to movement we are any more. Lost. Getting connected to my higher self was all very well, but I wasn’t dealing with the paying attention to the way spirit moves, and we profound fears, furies and pain that I was carrying begin to experience the reality that spirit and body are lovers, endlessly intertwining with each other, around: I was by-passing them, using the blissful longing for each other, delighting in each other. experience of deep meditation to escape my own on that score.

humanity. I wasn’t learning how to be with my own sexuality, or how to relate to someone else. I wasn’t figuring out how to give something to the world as an adult.

I collapsed in grief and found a therapist. I was lucky enough to find a highly skilled, big-hearted and far-seeing man. He saw me, accepted me, appreciated and praised me, even loved me. It was like having a stone lifted off me, coming out from under a life-long shadow, and the key was that he touched me emotionally. I also did groupwork with him—1980’s encounter style, which was a total eye-opener. I found that I enjoyed, and was good at, relating to people in edgy ways and extreme emotional states. I opened up and showed myself, letting go of huge wads of shame, guilt and fear. I learnt to see deeper into what was happening and to trust life as it unfolded; I discovered that there is magic in everything if only the mind and heart can stay open.

All this was a massive step forwards. But…he was father to me, and the time came to leave home.

His work and my connection with him opened a major doorway, but I couldn’t stay in that doorway, I had to keep walking. Leaving him psychologically took about two years, and literally within two days of a key stage in that process, he killed himself. I’d seen him only once in those two years.

I was devastated. Yet the gift of the timing wasn’t lost on me either; it was like rocket fuel to my development, goading me to take responsibility for my experience, and plunging me into a world of extreme darkness and light.

It was just at this time that I found Gabrielle Roth’s

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The rhythms add another dimension though, because they actually map out the essence of the creative process, this mother of all connections, the journey of connection between body and spirit.

They give form and structure to what happens anyway, which intensifies and focuses the experience.

Energy moves in waves, and when it changes from one state to another, just like on the ocean shore it goes through breaking waves. The 5 Rhythms map out the precise nature of breaking waves, identifying the stages that energy goes through naturally as it transforms—flowing, staccato, chaos, lyrical, and stillness.

Things naturally begin in a receptive, gentle, flowing way. A wave out at sea is a rounded flowing shape. Then energy builds and things naturally get more edgy, staccato; the wave grows to a sharp peak. At some point the wave has to break, and we all know this stage in the creative process, when things just seem to fall apart, structures break down, and all we can do is let go. Trying to shove the wave back into its staccato stage is ridiculous. This is the rhythm of chaos. There is life after chaos though! A breaking wave becomes a fascinating tumble of myriad shapes and forms, light and bubbly; after we’ve let go there is a lightness of touch that’s possible. After the storm there’s a freshness in the air, and if we stay with it through the crisis, the creative process yields it’s magic, as every artist knows. This is lyrical. Finally every journey reaches completion, the wave reaches the shore, energy has completely changed shape, and we land in the rhythm of stillness.

This practice takes me deep and keeps me real.

If I can only let my head go, so that rather than thinking or talking I’m dancing, if I can let my feet carry me round and round, so I’m not stuck in the mud, if I can just take enough deep breaths to blow away the cobwebs, then I’m free. I’m free of that numbed out, held in, weighed down place that somehow I grew up learning to inhabit, despite my parents’ best intentions. I’m free of the chat room in my head, paying attention instead to a wilder juicier beat. I’m free of yesterday and tomorrow, captivated instead by the energy flooding through me, feeling like a vessel for God (whatever ‘God’ means to the individual).

And isn’t that how it really is?? We ARE a vessel for the divine! We’ve just got to find ways to FEEL IT. This is the ultimate connection, when we actually experience ourselves as one with all-that-

is, with the silence inside the sound, the stillness inside the dance. The place where words fail us, and thinking is superseded by pure experience. In the end this is what it’s all about: every experience of connection is a taste of oneness with God. We want nothing less. Only the ultimate will do; we want to go on connecting over and over again.

We want that rush, that peace, that satisfaction, that ‘ahhhhhh’… over and over again. We want it all, but we need to start where we are. Small steps, one at a time, do work.

It IS time to make a shift collectively. And it’s up to us as individuals to do the work. So take a breath.

Right now. Take a breath and look up from your life. Let your head roll around your shoulders and take you somewhere. Find your feet and dance for this life.

This is it.

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