a few songs to inspire

Dear Friends,
If you're inspired by the music, then honor the artist by purchasing the cd or the file online or on amazon.
in movement,
smith

Oh to be a dog lamb fur pile

Saturday february 7

Spending the morning in our light-filled  living room this beautiful winter day, warm sunshine  streams from the 7 foot windows interrupting the winter chill with its long long shadows.  Bibo No Aozora ~ Gustavo Santaolalla plays in the background, a silvery, languid  composition for piano and strings. Leaving space, consciously not filling my morning with to-dos, just leaving empty the timeslot with nothing planned....what a gift to myself after all the recent business travel...allowing thoughts, daydreams to come and to go.  

This is a place where my heart lives in its most splendid and uninterrupted place, the serenity of stillness, that fascinating place of just being, of allowing the world to revolve around me while thoughts come and go,  ideas come and go, words, memories of others come,  but I am still.  Jack (my dog) on the floor below me, curled on his lamb rug,  like a dog~ lamb fur pile, his body rises with the in breath, falls with the out breath, seldom, but sometimes gently barking in his sleep,  a gutteral swallowed unconscious bark.  Making Noise ~ Damien Rice a perfect accompaniment.  

from smith in the midst of a winter still

Heartbeat with Jonathan Horan Feb 27-March 1

"The way is not in the sky.  The way is in the heart"  -Buddha

My intention as a teacher, and in my own emotional evolution, is to practice staying present with feelings.  So it is with great tenderness that I approach this journey into the heart, the part of us that beats and pumps and gives and receives and takes the old and transforms it into the new, purifying us, every minute of every day.  Using the 5Rhythms as a map to how our emotional energy morphs and moves, we will explore our emotions as energy, as power, as part of being human.

The wilderness of our heart scares us. we haven't been taught to track our feelings, much less respect them.  In fact, we often feel ashamed of them when they show up.  Even in our own families we hold back, dismiss and deny true responses. Even in the dark of the movie theater we swallow our tears.  This is very sad.  We've lots our spontaneity.  Why do we give fear so much power?

To befriend our emotions, not to be frozen by fear, is our destiny on this dancing path.   Fear is the clearest meter of our edge, the edge where we feel comfortable and grounded.  When we start to feel uncomfortable, its a challenge.   challenge is an invitation to move form who we are into who we are becoming.  The bigger the fear, the more important it is for us to face it.   It's not just a stoplight, it's a huge road sign:  COME DANCE WITH ME.  

Let's take the time to stop the world and pay attentions to our hearts.  Our attention is like a spotlight.  Feelings live in our body parts, and when we shine the light of our attention on specific body parts, memories crack open and move, dissolving the hard hold they have on us. Shapeshifting through feelings as they come up will open us up to their messages, their symbols and their signals.

One of the single-most powerful acts we can do is share our vulnerability. The more we open up and dance through our feelings, the safer the environment becomes to explore our edges. These dances will be our offering to the bigger world.  They will be our prayers for peace.

Jonathan Horan

Heartbeat with Jonathan Horan

In the deep of winter in the deep south

Atlanta Georgia 

Location: Portfolio Center 125 Bennett Street Atlanta Ga 30305

Dates: February 27-March 1

Time:  Friday 7-10 Saturday 11-5  Sunday 11-5

Tuition: $250. or $220 early registration by Feb 5 

Contact:  Tracey Upton  thewaveatlanta@yahoo.com   678-937-0049

or            Smith Hanes   smith@smithhanes.com          770-780-1316

Prerequisite:  Waves

Recommended reading:  Sweat Your Prayers, Maps to Ecstasy both authored by Gabrielle Roth

Travel and accommodation advice available upon request

the beginning

A journey into the  5Rhythms 

Over the course of the last five years, I have embarked on a personal discovery that has become what I now know is a lifelong learning. Back in winter of  2003 I  signed up for a 5Rhythms class with Jonathan Horan in Atlanta at a yoga studio and was immediately hooked. I'll never forget when Jonathan demonstrated the rhythms how I said quietly to myself, that I had finally found a place where i could feel completely AT HOME. I immediately went to the 5rhythms website in New York to investigate ways to study more.  In just a month or so, I was in New York at a workshop called TRIBE.  It was like a subtle internal earthquake. 

I remember upon my return back home after TRIBE during my morning workout noticing my body was moving differently.  At the time it was impossible to articulate how, but the movements were different....my warm up was slower and fuller, my legs stretched better than they had in the past, and the way my body moved on the treadmill was more flowing, not so much effort. It was like my whole body was a part of the motion, not just the legs.

Later that year I went to Brussells, Antwerp and the countryside of Belgium to study with an English teacher, YaAcov Darling Khan, then back to New York to work with Gabrielle Roth, the creator of the work. 

I began to see these amazing changes in my flexibility, an openness and quietness in my body and in my life. On the dance floor, and in life, I was having these short sweet illuminations....fed by the sweat of hours and hours of moving and dancing.  

I look forward to bringing this work to Atlanta in our class on sundays and dancing with all of you out there in the near future.

in movement, smith

Weekly Classes at Portfolio Center, on Bennet Street in Atlanta

Announcing a weekly Waves Class.

Sundays  4-6 pm weekly see below for location.

Class is lead by certified 5rhythms teachers Smith Hanes or Tracey Upton

Waves/5rhythms is the dynamic practice developed by Gabrielle Roth.  It is a simple, powerful moving meditation that anyone can practice. There are no steps to follow no choreography to learn, no way to do it wrong.  The 5rhythms were designed to release the dancer in every body, no matter what its size, age limitations or experience.

To find your dance, is to find yourself at your most creative fluid level Just like light, sound or ocean waves, a dancing body when moving freely passes through 5 distinct rhythmic patterns: Flowing, Staccato, Chaos, Lyrical and Stillness.  These patterns continuously repeat themselves in a wave of motion. The 5Rhythms are a cathartic form of movement for the body and soul, a spiritual practice where we "sweat our prayers"

Atlanta

Weekly Wave:  Sunday 4-6 PM

Portfolio Center ~  Bennet Street  http://www.portfoliocenter.com/about/contact/directions