Like a lot of people, when I first came across Gabrielle Roth’s 5Rhythms practice, I assumed that the term “flowing” meant moving like water. I mean, water flows - that’s obvious, right?
So, again like a lot of people, I was taken by surprise that when I dug deeper into Gabrielle’s work, I found that she linked the rhythm of Flowing with the element of earth, and that water was linked to the rhythm of Chaos.
Well, when I let go of the fixed idea that “water flows”, then of couse I could see that water moves in many ways: it crashes, it spirals, it evaporates, it trickles, it pours. In short, it is as unpredictable as Chaos.
And the Flowing earth? Perhaps if Gabrielle had chosen the musical term “Legato” instead, then it wouldn’t cause such confusion. Flowing and Legato both describe continuous motion, but Legato also has the sense of being “bound together” so that there is no separation (when the instuction on a score is “legato”, then one note flows into the next, without separation). Think of the way that solid matter is bound together, even when it moves, and you’re getting there.
The next five posts that I’ll be publishing deal with each of the elements in turn, drawing heavily on Gabrielle’s writing in order to show how she arrived at the particular correlation of rhythms and elements that she passed on to her students.
Of course, rhythms are not elements and elements are not rhythms, so agreeing with Gabrielle is not compulsory. Experiment, and find what helps you to keep going deeper.
The point really, is to find a way to make sure that we’re not leaving any part (any element) of ourselves behind.