In Sweat Your Prayers, movement and theatre artist, teacher and music producer Gabrielle Roth shares the juice from her lifetime of dance/energy practice. Her cutting-edge workshops have been attended by thousands worldwide, and now she offers this book to guide us to our potential for ecstasy.

To sweat is to pray, to make an offering of your innermost self, to create your own prayer beads. Sweat is holy water, pearls of liquid that release your past, anointing all your parts in a baptism by fire. Sweat burns karma, purifying body and soul. Sweat is an ancient and universal form of self-healing, whether done in the gym, sauna, or the sweatlodge. I do it on the dance floor. The more you dance, the more you sweat. The more you sweat, the more you pray. The more you pray, the closer you come to ecstasy.

Roth has cultivated the raw power of rhythm into a path of self-realization that gives us a practice, a perspective, and a philosophy that allow us to celebrate the wild, ecstatic dancer within. Inside this dancer beats the heart of a tribal individual, the part of us that knows how to love, reminds us we are not alone, and inspires us to be our true selves.

This book is an expedition through five universal rhythms which catalyze motion deep in the psyche—flowing, staccato, chaos, lyrical, and stillness. Each is a practical tool of awakening that will release us to dance on the edge, to be outrageous, to transform suffering into art, and art into awareness. Roth uses these rhythms as both doorways and metaphors in this radical new perspective on the architecture of the soul. She also lays out her map of the archetypes of Mother, Mistress, Madonna, Father, Son and Holy Spirit in both their light and shadow forms, and how they relate to the five rhythms.

With useful, provocative tools and down-to-earth teachings, Sweat Your Prayers offers a wealth of doable exercises, creative meditations, heartfelt stories and road-tested home truths on the art of living your gifts—at full volume.