FRANCIS ELIOT

I currently work as a 5Rhythms teacher, Jnana yoga facilitator & active father to my two teenage sons. Over the years I’ve been greatly influenced by various teachers whom I’ve been blessed to study with & I feel particularly indebted to Thich Nhat Hanh, Didier Danthois, Adyashanti & most importantly Rupert Spira & Gabrielle Roth; the latter of whom took me under her Raven wing back in 2000 & guided me to turn my life inside out by teaching me the art of experiencing and exploring life as an awesome Dance from whose perspective we are already free. I completed my training with her in 2005 and under the guidance of other meditation teachers have been developing skills to guide people into this experiential perspective ever since. I teach as I like to be taught: with sensitivity, integrity & humour, passionately transmitting an embodied understanding of the transformative power of the practices I teach.

Gabrielle Roth saw no separation, all she saw in the human being was the dance of creativity, manifest as well as in potential. This welcoming of me as nothing short of an innately creative being was something I’d never encountered before. Never had I felt truly seen and met in the limitless way that Gabrielle saw me. She gave me a new way to experience myself and the world. Yet she didn’t just awaken me to the fundamental existence of this vibrant creativity that we all are, she provided me and countless others with an extraordinary path from which to nurture and develop this creativity in the day to day world. Consequently my primary spiritual practice for the last 25 years has been Gabrielle Roth’s 5Rhythms and I continue to dance, study and teach the practice regularly.

For the last 10 years my teaching has been deeply influenced by my ongoing studies into the nature of consciousness through my current teacher Rupert Spira with whom I’ve attended 23 week long retreats. The liberating realisation and experiential understanding of who the one we all refer to as ‘I’ truly is, has taken the tension out of my teaching and opened up my gatherings to being a placeless place from which we experience the presence of our self aware, ever present unified self. I no longer facilitate people to improve themselves, for they are already this whole, timeless, infinite being. Instead I create a space for people to come to experience that the dance of body, mind and emotions is this very consciousness in motion, unified and already liberated. In allowing life’s dance from the perspective of unity, the body, mind and emotions find their natural harmony, and in time we get to see from our hearts that contrary to what our culture tells us, peace and happiness is our true birthright.