"If you put the psyche in motion, it will heal itself." Gabrielle Roth

The lyrical rhythm has a quality of coming up with an answer or solution, or letting go of the question, a feeling of relief, a sense of spaciousness... like a river that becomes a delta, before letting itself go into the sea, or like the leaves of the tree turning to beautiful colours and offering its succulent ripe fruit.

I (Nancy) have had a love/ hate relationship with lyrical. Now, mostly, if I don’t push it at the beginning of lyrical, I can taste it in all its luscious juiciness. If I’m really gentle, delicate, even tender as I transition from chaos to lyrical, at a certain point, the more spacious, lightly tripping lyrical will come to me - so long as I’m not pushing for it (and ending up getting a bit tense). I can’t quite pinpoint what exactly happens when I tip over into that - mostly it’s to do with not hanging on to fixed ideas of what lyrical “should” be like:- sometimes it’s rebellious, cheeky, sometimes delicious, or coming out in unimaginable/ unheard of ways. After all, it’s that fresh newness that comes after I’ve really come through something in chaos - oh, now I’m a new person, what wants to come now? Or, it may manifest as a gentle dance of allowing what has happened in earlier parts of the wave to percolate.

I (Edo) now see that this rhythm is an inextricable part of myself, woven into the core of who I am. I experience it when I can offer the best of myself; when I can, in an easy-going and fitting way, find and apply a quality of mine in a given situation; when at the end of a piece of  research, I find a solution, proof or explanation, or when I decide to interrupt some research, temporarily or to end it without result, realising that I’ve done all I can at that moment.

You can find a more detailed account in Gabrielle’s book 'Maps to Ecstasy', and in chapter 7 of her book 'Sweat Your Prayers'.