The Gabrielle Roth's 5 Rhythms®

Weekend or 5 Days Intensive workshop

Circles of Held Awareness

About the work

Circles of Held Awareness is an original offering developed by Jan Redsted. It grew out of more than twenty years of teaching within the 5Rhythms tradition and was shaped by a number of extraordinary teachers and traditions that gradually transformed my understanding of movement, spirituality and relationship.

Gabrielle Roth was perhaps the most significant teacher I ever met. Through many conversations and years within the 5Rhythms, she fundamentally changed my understanding of spiritual practice. She showed me that the body is not separate from spirit and that movement is not simply something the body does, but a doorway into awareness, spirit and direct participation in life.

Meeting indigenous traditions gradually revealed another separation I had never questioned: the idea that the individual exists apart from the world in which life unfolds.

I want to mention 3 humans

Victor Sanchez
The writer and Anthropologist Victor Sanchez who wrote the bestseller "The Teachings of Don Carlos",
Some of the first 5Rhythms teachers I worked with basically used Victors methods and I simply had to meet him. Spending time with him gave me a clear understanding of the double nature of being human. Partly seperat and partly unified. But maybe more significantly his teaching of Shamanism with out selfimportance. For many Westerners, shamanism becomes a search for power. For indigenous people, it is first and foremost an act of service.

Rita Makkannaw
The writer and elder Rita Makkannaw who is white but lived more than 20 years with the Bush Cree people in Canada and wrote several books about the Indegenious people at Turtle Island. Her wisdom and simplicity of the core message in "be who you are" finally landed in me and made me see the nature of my own roots and culture as the true gateway to my spirituality.

Henry Laboucan
Bush Cree Elder Henry Laboucan helped me to recognize how easily the Western mind approaches mystery as something to understand, explain or possess. His presence revealed another possibility: that mystery is entered through humility, relations and service.

Alongside these influences, I spent some years assisting Andrea Juhan and more than ten years assisting Alain Allard in their advanced group process work within the 5Rhythms. Those years gave me a deep appreciation for how individual experience unfolds within a collective field.

These experiences, together with four years of training in Systemic Constellation Work, gradually shaped the direction of this offering.

Over time many earlier 5Rhythms teachers developed their work in different directions.
My own path has been to continue exploring this particular stream from within the 5Rhythms lineage.

Circles of Held Awareness is my ongoing exploration of the meeting between Gabrielle Roth's understanding of the Unified Field and the phenomenological field of Systemic Constellation Work, held within the living practice of the 5Rhythms.

Although they emerged from different traditions, both point toward a reality in which individual experience cannot be separated from the larger field of relationship in which it unfolds.

Circles of Held Awareness is my ongoing exploration of how movement, relationship and the collective field meet within the living practice of the 5Rhythms.

Circles of Held Awareness

This work unfolds within circles, creating a shared space for all, rather than addressing an audience. It emphasizes mutual presence over performance, and shared experience over individual focus.

At times, one person enters the centre of the circle. The centre belongs to no one. It exists because the circle is there to hold

During a Teachers' Refresh with Gabrielle Roth in Hamburg somewhat 20 years ago, she invited all of us teachers to stand hand in hand in a large circle.

"This is what we are," she said. "A circle."

Then she stepped into the centre.

As movement deepens, a living field gradually becomes apparent. It is shaped by everyone's presence, attention and participation, while at the same time inviting each person into a deeper relationship with the field itself.

It becomes a space where each of us can feel, witness, and participate in its movement and transformative power.This practice is ritual, not medicine. Movement is approached as ceremony: a way of listening, participating and remembering our place within the living whole. It is grounded in the paradox at the heart of how we as humans see our selves as separate and yet are one... that life is in constant motion, nothing fixed, yet within this change lives an essence that remains unchanged.

Indigenous traditions speak of us as “double beings.” One part lives in separation, threat, and competition. The other in unity, harmony, and shared belonging.
This paradox is mirrored in the medicine wheel, a circle in motion whose center remains still.

An invitation to hold and create space for our shared humanity.

To hold space for each-other that is safe to feel, express and move what arises. A moving meditation, investigation and witnessing with attention and awareness. To get out of the way and allow the shift of attention; from the Dancer to the Dance, from moving to being moved. Gradually another question begins to emerge.

Not only: What do I want from life?

But also: What does life want from me?

Perhaps our deepest purpose is not something we invent, but something life unfolds through us as we learn to listen and not be in its way.So to quote the famous “We are all one” But how can there be we if there is only one?Welll… in this view “We are we and yet one”
Love Jan

Clarification
Circles of Held Awareness is an independent offering developed by Jan Redsted.

While some aspects of the work may be familiar to others, or related approaches, this offering is not affiliated with, endorsed by, certified by, or officially connected to any organization.

No copyrighted training materials, proprietary frameworks, or protected content from other organizations are used. All workshop materials have been independently developed.

Historical references are included for lineage and educational purposes only.

FOR FLYERS ETC

WORKSHOP DESCRIPTION

Individual Presence in Shared Mystery

A 5Rhythms® Waves level workshop

Circles of Held Awareness A Five-Day Intensive

This intensive is an invitation to give space for presence, to sense what longs to emerge, to explore the mystery of our shared humanity, and to discover the ever-present stillness beneath movement.

At times, one person enters the centre of the circle. Through shared attention, a doorway opens. Patterns, movements and questions begin to emerge that resonate throughout the whole field.

Gabrielle Roth spoke about the Unified Field, the living intelligence that can emerge when we move beyond individual experience into the shared. Indigenous traditions understand life as relationship. All living beeings, the seen and the unseen are not separate worlds but part of a living whole. The circle becomes a way of remembering our belonging, order and balance.

Five days of entering the circle. Through movement, witnessing and presence, attention moves from the individual towards the field that holds us all. Something may begin to emerge that belongs to no one and, yet is shaped by everyone. A living field of awareness.

Within that field, different questions begin to arise.
Not only: What do I want from life?
But also: What does life want from me?

A listening to the wisdom that arise when movement becomes ceremony and awareness becomes shared.

For Facebook posts etc:

Sometimes one person enters the centre. Sometimes another. The centre belongs to no one. It exists because the circle is there to hold it.

Without the circle there is no centre. Without the centre the circle loses its orientation.

That image has stayed with me ever since.

Over the years, my path has also been deeply influenced by systemic and constellation work, where one person's movement often reveals patterns, behaviors and conditionings that belong to the field of relationship in which the individual participates.

Over time these experiences and inspirations gradually come together.

Circles of Held Awareness is a way of exploring this delicate meeting between the me and we, within the living practice of the 5Rhythms.

At times, one person enters the centre of the circle. Through shared attention, a doorway to the shared field may open.

Gabrielle Roth often spoke of the Unified Field, the living intelligence that can emerge when movement carries us beyond individual experience into shared presence.

Many indigenous traditions understand life as relationship. All living beings, the seen and the unseen, are not separate worlds but expressions of one living whole.

The circle becomes a way of remembering belonging, order and balance.

Over five days, movement, witnessing and presence gradually shift attention towards the field that holds us all. Something may begin to be seen, that belongs to no one, yet is shaped by everyone: a living field of awareness.

As attention widens beyond the individual, another question begins to emerge.

Not only: What do I want from life?

But also: What does life want from me?

Perhaps our deepest purpose is not something we create or invent, but something life unfolds through us as we learn to listen and not be in its way.

This intensive is an invitation to give space for the human being rather than the human doing, to let practice happen, and to be curious about what becomes possible when movement, awareness and community come together in service of whats more than self.

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