Sweat Your Prayers [Hardcover]

Gabrielle Roth (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: January 1, 1998

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.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

Lest you think that spirituality is relegated to the higher mind, Sweat Your Prayers is a reminder that our bodies are indeed cradles of the soul. Physical movement can be a potent medium for spiritual awakening, according to Gabrielle Roth, who has dedicated much of her life to teaching and exploring the holy rewards of dance. The soul has five natural rhythms, explains Roth: flowing, staccato, chaos, lyrical, and stillness. She teaches us how to identify our natural rhythms, but she also encourages us to practice dancing through all five rhythms in order to become more whole, evolved, and complete beings. Roth is also an acclaimed music producer who has released numerous compact discs that work as excellent dance companions to this energizing book.

From 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. 50,000 first printing; One Spirit Book Club alternate; author tour.
Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 217 pages
• Publisher: Tarcher; First Edition/First Printing edition (January 1, 1998)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0874778786
• ISBN-13: 978-0874778786
• Product Dimensions: 8.9 x 6 x 1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.4 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (14 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,189,091 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

30 of 30 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Rhythm and Soul EVERYWHERE, November 9, 2001

By 

Elderbear (Loma Linda, Aztlan) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)   

This review is from: Sweat Your Prayers (Paperback)

"When you finally commit yourself completely to a creative act, knots inside you will loosen." (p. 128)

We can sort spiritual paths and psychological techniques by how the approach the human body. Gabrielle Roth's book serves as a useful adjunct to those paths that honor the body, rather than ignoring or minimizing it. For the atheists and agnostics out there, this book can also be used at a psychological level, and does not necessitate belief in "prayer" as a sacrament. In the book Roth presents five archetypal rhythms that help break some of the self-destructive patterns of Western culture and re-unite the practitioner with his or her spirit.

Roth begins the book with a brief autobiography, which also serves to establish her bona fides for writing a work on the spiritual/psychological use of dance and movement. She challenges the Western dismemberment of flesh from soul, body from spirit, she reclaims the chthonic and carnal. "The soul can only be present when body and spirit are one; it cannot breathe, exist, or move disconnected from the body." (p. 4) This book is her testimony to how we can retrieve our souls through our bodies.

Roth introduces the idea of the dance as a spiritual practice. She gives examples from her own life, challenges a list of excuses (I hate my body ... I'm too old ... I'm too shy). Then she offers "the only dance lesson you'll ever need:" Everybody has to find their own way, in their own time/space constraints to practice. She reminds us that "life is rhythm" and we need only participate in that rhythm consciously to be dancing, to be re-weaving body and soul. She then offers five concepts to help prepare for doing the rhythms: 1) That the goal is to move, to experience, not to complete something; 2) Dance happens in space, between things, between people, between worlds; 3) Awareness is the key element of dance, by paying attention to the body in rhythm, we alter consciousness and manifest our souls; 4) Follow your breath, let your breath move you; 5) Choose music that speaks to you and makes you aware of the five rhythms that make up Roth's "Wave".

She presents the five basic rhythms (flowing, staccato, chaos, lyrical, and stillness) and links them to primal archetypes. She has created glyphs/symbols for these links, and invites the reader to create their own. Each of the five rhythms gets its own chapter, detailing ideas linking the rhythm to archetypes, body, soul, and heart. Roth explains well, providing compelling examples to illustrate her points. Each chapter has exercises ("To Do/Not Do") as well as a list of words that elicit the archetypes for Roth. Poetry and quotations sprinkle through each chapter.

Roth concludes with a chapter called "Waves" where she presents examples of the five rhythms that go beyond dance, examining among others experiences of the subway, relationships, and architecture. Some examples are hers, others come from friends and students. The book provides contact information for the author, as well as video and CD resources.

Roth does an entertaining job of describing a spiritual/psychological physical practice as well as a state of being that has tremendous potential to enhance life. I have worked with her rhythms at times in my life, and found this approach to be empowering. Other times I avoid the movement, the dance-and I'm not certain why. I have found this work quite helpful and recommend it to anybody who feels the need to better connect body and soul.

(If you'd like to dialogue further about this book, click on the "about me" link above & drop me an email. Thanks!)

21 of 21 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Thought-provoking, exciting, and fun to read, November 23, 1998

By A Customer

This review is from: Sweat Your Prayers (Hardcover)

I was raised in a religious tradition that views the body as the source of sin and the antithesis of spirit. Over the years, most of my physical activity (e.g., yoga) has focussed on disciplining the body so that it wouldn't get in the way of the soul's higher aspirations. Although I enjoyed dancing in social settings, I considered this merely one of the crass earthly pleasures, and never took myself seriously as a dancer because I don't have a "dancer's body." Then last year, at the age of 50-plus, in a moment of "Oh, what the h*ll" I succumbed to a long-standing fascination with belly dancing and signed up for a class. It's been a revelation: not only am I stronger and fitter, but I've become friends with my body as never before.
Gabrielle Roth went through a similar process, and the results are embodied in her workshops, videos, music CDs, and, now, this book. Genuinely respecting one's body as a partner to the soul is a radical notion for most of us. Roth appeals to our intuition (our gut feelings!) as well as our rational mind, and the book is not only thought-provoking but exciting on many levels. Her passion, vitality, and enthusiasm are well expressed through her writing; she phrases her thoughts memorably, and the book is an unmitigated pleasure to read. While I don't buy all of her quasi-Jungian view of personality, one doesn't have to to appreciate the book or the author's general approach to dance as a spiritual practice. Heartily recommended, and deserves reading and rereading.

17 of 18 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Dance for the Soul, December 23, 2001

By 

Boudica (Ohio USA) - See all my reviews

Amazon Verified Purchase

This review is from: Sweat Your Prayers (Paperback)

Another artist making a literary crossover is Gabrielle Roth. She is probably best known for Gabrielle Roth and the Mirrors, her percussion, rhythmic music group. However, Ms. Roth is more involved with dance as a spiritual map. Ms. Roth has developed a five part rhythmic expression to transform music into dance, dance into emotion and from this emotion to a Spiritual experience.

Her book is a handbook to transform dance into a Spiritual expression. I loved her mix of personal experiences, stories, and humor to teach her five rhythms, what they mean and how to apply them. The path always leads to our own personal spiritual growth. She explores the five rhythms of flowing, staccato, chaos, lyrical and stillness. She blends the feminine with the masculine and melds this with trance and dance, lifting it to Spirituality.

The five rhythms dancing can be done with your group, or you can do it alone. You do not have to have lessons, or be expert, or graceful, just willing to let yourself go and explore your sense of rhythm and spirituality.

This is a wonderful instructional book, lots of feeling and sincerity on the part of Ms. Roth. I enjoyed her style of writing and her treatment of the subject shows a true commitment on her part. An excerpt from her opening chapter stuck in my head for a long while: "Energy moves in waves. Waves move in patterns. Patterns move in rhythms. A human being is just that, energy, waves, patterns, rhythms. Nothing more. Nothing less. A dance."