Core Curriculum

Watch a baby in its natural state and what do you see? A body that undulates from head to toe with every breath. A human being that wails when it hurts, wags and wiggles when it’s happy, and engages with everything from mommy to dust motes with total fascination.

Fast-forward to adulthood and what do you see? Bodies that have stopped moving, hearts that are held back, relationships that barely survive the restraints we put on them – all to make life feel safe, secure and predictable.

Whatever is fixed or frozen cannot breathe, grow or change. Gabrielle’s maps are an integrated, progressive, spiral journey to retrieve the instinctive movements of body, heart and mind that return us to our natural, soulful state of being. These maps are a physical, emotional and spiritual curriculum that systematically leads us back to our original aliveness.

Maps for the Journey

In WAVES, we begin the 5Rhythms practice, the simple yet profound moving meditation that puts our bodies back in motion where they belong. Returning again and again to this fundamental practice, we begin to free our bodies into fluidity. Inevitably, old feelings that have been locked in our limbs or caged in our chests begin to shake loose.

Then we enter the realm of HEARTBEAT where we focus on how emotions move through us, or don’t. We learn to allow feelings to rise and fall away as naturally as an ocean wave, neither hanging onto them nor pushing them away. In the process, we notice where our hearts move and where they freeze, where we follow the flow of connection and where we hold back from what we want most: to love and be loved.

This awareness takes us to CYCLES, an exploration of our relationships over the course of our lives. Who are the people, events and teachers that have shaped us? What are the challenges and gifts they left us with? How do we surrender to the unavoidable movement from birth to childhood, through puberty into maturity, to be ready for our eventual death? How do we honor our unique history without being ruled by it? How do we see our fixed patterns of behavior in this world and then free ourselves from rigidity and habit?

These insights lead us into the work of MIRRORS, a profound investigation into the embedded, repetitive thoughts that hold our patterns in place. By illuminating these thought patterns, these predictable “ego characters” that hold us hostage, we begin to see them for what they are: mind habits that block the full expression of who we are. The work of Mirrors is a catalytic shift that moves our fluid, intimate, creative soul back into the driver’s seat of our lives.

Once we are no longer who we “think” ourselves to be, we enter THE SILVER DESERT. Sitting in the beautiful container of silence and stillness, we nourish the unique mystery and endless possibility that is our birthright, our home.