Sweat Your Prayers: Movement As Spiritual Practice »

In Sweat Your Prayers, internationally acclaimed movement and theater artist Gabrielle Roth translates to the printed page the insights of her nearly forty years of teaching personal and spiritual development. Her workshops, attended by thousands around the world, teach us to realize our potential for ecstasy as we experience movement and ritual theater techniques. The book is a journey through five universal rhythms-flowing, staccato, chaos, lyrical, and stillness. These rhythms can free the body and spirit from ordinary consciousness and catalyze motion deep in the psyche. Each sacred rhythm is a teacher, a gateway to the soul. Flowing holds the feminine mysteries, staccato the masculine. In chaos, the challenge is to integrate these principles into the flow of one's personal energy, to find the magical blend of feminine and masculine energy that makes each person unique. Lyrical is the context of self-realization, the full expression of the soul. And in stillness, the mother of all rhythms, we find the emptiness of the uncluttered mind wherein we contemplate the mystery of it all. Practicing the rhythms frees the body and becomes a way to express the heart and clear the mind. Complete with personal stories and interactive exercises, Sweat Your Prayers reveals an ancient and contemporary method for unleashing a natural sense of movement, resulting in both personal power and presence of the soul.

Publishers Weekly

"The soul can only be present when body and spirit are one," exclaims Roth (Maps to Ecstasy) in this amiably free-flowing spiritual autobiography. She goes on to explain how dance can be the path to soul or true self. Roth discovered dance as a means of self-initiation and integration through a career that began with a stint as a massage therapist at the wellspring of the human potential movement, Esalen Institute. There, Fritz Perls invited Roth to teach movement to his therapy groups. Prodding her physically frozen students to sense their bodies and breathe, Roth quickly discovered that "two hours of moving were as powerful as two years on the couch." She came to isolate five rhythms related to five archetypes or states of being. Roth claims that even terminally inhibited people can learn to enter these rhythms and sense how it feels to inhabit "mother, mistress, madonna, father, son and holy spirit." The three feminine archetypes follow a flowing rhythm, according to Roth, while the energy of the masculine archetypes corresponds to a staccato rhythm. Roth discovered that when the masculine and feminine fuse, a rhythm of fertile chaos results, as in acts of artistic creation or love. The resolution of chaos is the lightness and liberation of a lyrical rhythm, while stillness is the most profound rhythm of all. Roth's entertaining, appealingly conversational tale, full of breezy asides about Manhattan restaurants and scenes, will tantalize readers into believing that dancing is indeed a joyful way to "sweat" prayers, to seek our innermost truths as they are lived, in movement.