About the work

A Critical view and my Approach to the 5Rhythms Heartbeat map.

From harming to healing
I dont know how many Heartbeat workshops I've done and with how many teachers... stopped counting many years ago, but did the first in 1998.
Actually this workshop was so horrible that its a wonder I stayed in 5Rhythms... but that’s another story.

I used to think I was hopeless and was doing it wrong. I felt there was this unspoken expectation — sometimes even directly encouraged — if I couldn’t feel anything… that in it self - was wrong , so I could at least move as if I could. Sometimes it actually felt true. But more often, it felt hollow. Performed. Something in me knew I was trying to "fake it till I made it".

Around me, people were crying, shouting, collapsing, laughing, and basically nothing inside me, apart from a deep wonder? I started to think sadness is supposed to look like this very expressive, noisy and dramatic dance... same with anger. Joy was the most difficult for me... Often I saw a bunch of ungrounded smiling people around... I felt so awkward?

I began to feel that I was moving through expectations rather than learning anything about emotions and I felt even further away my own emotional reality.

I now realize what I was sensing was a deeper kind of disconnect — not from my emotions, but from my relationship to them. I seeked help in Gabrielles books but with not much luck, although I later found some sense in her descriptions and anecdotes!
It wasn’t until I started to study the topic from the several angels where I came across the work of some significant researchers.

I Can’t mention them all here, but want to mention three that changed my perspective totally. Later made me realize that Gabrielle pointed at something valuable.

I chose these 3 pioneers

I know it will be a very short reference to these peoples enormous and fantastic work so please dive in to each of them if the subject interests you: Alexander Lowen, Dr. Lisa Feldman Barrett and Gabor Maté.

Lisa Feldman Barrett

Lisa Feldman Barrett’s research turns the old model of emotions on its head. She argues that emotions are not universal, automatic responses that simply “happen” to us. Instead, they are constructed by the brain, built from predictions based on our past experiences, culture, and context.
In other words, what we call “anger” or “joy” is our brain’s best guess, a label we place on the energetic states moving through our body. If we’ve been taught that anger should look explosive or joy should be big and bright, we may perform those scripts - even when they don’t match what we’re actually feeling. Even more significant for me was that she claims that how we interpret other peoples emotional state is pure projection based on the same. One person can feel the exact same energetic state in the body as someone else but interpret totally different... what one interpret as fear can be anger or sadness for another! Barrett helped me understand why faking it never worked for me. I wasn’t being dishonest. I was just trying to follow a map that didn’t fit the terrain of my nervous system.

Alexander Lowen

I revisited the work of Alexander Lowen, who spoke of emotions not as psychological stories but as inner energies — currents that rise from the depths or core of the body toward the surface of the skin. He described emotions as the colors of life, the felt sense of aliveness itself. From this lens, emotions aren’t necessarily about content; they’re about sensation. The ability to feel, physically, intimately — is what gives life meaning. And when we lose that connection, we don’t just lose emotional fluency — we lose vitality. So from this perspective depression is not a feeling but a loss of the ability to feel.

Gabor Maté

And finally, Gabor Maté’s insights on healthy emotional expression echoed this in a powerful way.
In his words, “Anger is a surge of power through the body. It doesn’t need to be acted out — it needs to be allowed."

He distinguishes between healthy anger — an embodied physiological process — and rage, which is often a form of anxiety or reactivity. The moment we act out without presence, we lose the opportunity to actually feel and process the emotion. True emotional work is not theatrical. It’s somatic. It’s cellular and sometimes even invisible. But more significnatly from this perspective dramatic expression can be directly damaging for our health.

So what does all this mean for Heartbeat?

It means we don’t need to express emotions in Heartbeat work. We don’t need to prove them or display them or exaggerate them so we feel like we’re “doing it right.

Instead, we can turn toward a different invitation

• To become curious about our relationship to them
• To sense first, and realize how we name later.
• To allow the body to move — before the mind rushes in to label or dramatize.
• To move with what is and move what is sensed.

A Heartbeat workshop for me, isn’t a workshop where you’ll be asked to “feel or get into emotions or even move them

The focus will be the difference between energetic states — like being activated or calm, feeling energized or tired and the level of positive or negative felt in the moment. Usually it's a beautiful and messy mix of everything.

Heartbeat is meant to be a support, in finding own relationship to emotions and how we create them from conditions and belief systems.

So if you’ve ever felt you had to fake it to fit in, if you’ve ever doubted your emotional fluency because you didn’t “feel enough” in workshops like these — you’re not alone. And you’re not wrong.

You can stop here if you like but I would like to document or argue that Gabrielle also described what is communicated here.

In Gabrielle Roth’s Book "Maps To Ecstasy", emotions are dances. The five emotions of her Heartbeat map — fear, anger, sadness, joy, and compassion — are not just psychological categories; they are physical rhythms, lived and felt in muscle, breath, and heart.

What I earlier saw when I participated in some of colleagues Heartbeats was in contrast to what I try to communicate here.

Gabrielle does not advocate for uninhibited emotional expression. She warned just as clearly against melodrama and performative catharsis as she does against numbness. For her, there was a tightrope to walk: a place where feeling is spontaneous but not reckless, true but not indulgent, free but not unconscious.

So how, then, do we allow emotional energy to move without losing ourselves—or others—in the process?

The Heart Must Be Free, But the Space Must Be Held

Gabrielle emphasized to me that freedom is impossible in a vacuum. Safety is not a constraint on expression—it is its precondition.

Group work always involves building a field of trust, a collective nervous system where individuals can risk expression without fear of shaming, retaliation, or abandonment.

“The only real option is to feel our emotions, to own them, to accept them as our own, and to express them appropriately.”

— Gabrielle Roth, Maps to Ecstasy, p. 62

She is not inviting us to dramatize or to purge, but to express—cleanly, truly, and in resonance with others.
Spontaneity is not about impulsiveness. It is about truth arising organically from the body, not the ego. The dancer doesn’t “decide” to feel. She listens, senses, and allows.

Gabrielle’s emotional map does not tell us what to feel or how to act. It shows us how to move what is already there. Her message aligns with what Lisa Feldman Barrett later proposed: that emotions are not fixed programs but interpretations of bodily states.

Gabrielle’s 5Rhythms teach people to feel the raw data of the body — activation, contraction, trembling, stillness — and give them movement rather than meaning.

In this way, emotional expression becomes authentic rather than habitual:

“What we move will change”

We don’t have to know what we’re feeling before we move. We move, and the knowing comes. Much like Gabor Maté’s concept of healthy anger as a “surge of power” that doesn’t require acting out, Gabrielle speaks of emotional release as physiological, not theatrical. The goal is not to explode, but to circulate — to let the energy run its course.

She invites us into emotional expression that respects the space, honors the body, and moves the story without hijacking it.

Discernment Is Not Censorship

Responsibility is not repression. We are not asked to hold back. This is the delicate place where we are invited to explore - spontaneous expression that is not childish or unconscious, but grounded and relational. She insisted we take full responsibility for our energetic impact, not by controlling our emotions but by becoming skillful in their flow.

To move emotions does not mean to perform them. It means to listen to them, get to know them, see our relationship to them. move with them, and let them pass through.

This is how work with emotions become healing rather than harming

Thank you for reading.
 

FOR FLYERS ETC

WORKSHOP DESCRIPTION

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The Gabrielle Roth’s 5Rhythms HeartbeatMap is a meditative movement of the five essence emotions:

FEAR protects, ANGER defends, SADNESS releases, JOY connects and COMPASSION unites.

Emotions are manifestations of energy that unites body and mind in the heart. It’s energy in motion more than the content of our life’s stories. The basis for love and an open heart is to be able to sense the vibrating life in the body. When emotions flow freely and spontaneously, like blood circulating, the emotions are pure life energy that ensures our vitality and survival.

Emotions and feelings in movement practice Unhealthy expression of emotion, can contribute to illness. There is a delicate balance between healthy expression and unregulated acting-out of emotions with shallow breathing and muscle tension.

Emotions, positive and negative, can be experienced as a powerful surges of electricity going through the body. An energetic process that occurs and run its course, giving us choice about whether to act out or not.

The real experience of emotions, is experience without acting out. Simultaneously, a complete disappearance of all tension where the Heart opens and gives colors and meaning to life.

 
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