(Jeremy P. Tarcher, Publisher)

  What is the thread that ties your life together, all the separate, scattered stories of your days and weeks? For Gabrielle Roth, that thread is intuition, from its tiniest flash to its most undulating rhythm, and rhythm is how Ms. Roth relates to the world. She's defined five major life rhythms: flowing, staccato, chaos, lyrical, and stillness. "The self is a dance," she tells us, "constantly in motion."

We numb ourselves by pretending to have all the answers, identifying with roles, such as the perfect wife, ideal friend, loyal listener, when, in fact, we are all those things and none of them. We are the stillness and the emergent beat, the pretense and the soul. We blind ourselves by clinging to established "answers," when we could look deeply within, connect with the chaos and ultimate wisdom of the earth.

Dance is the form of worship that moves this author, being in the body and allowing it to fully express, to connect with its own instinctive force. This, she feels, shakes off the entrapment of the ego, the voices of fear that pull us away from our own inner truth.

It's through our feet, she tells us, that we connect with the skin of the earth, the divine darkness that is in us. All of life is a dance; particles move, and movement brings us into that divine, intuitive flow, into the "spontaneous, instinctive wisdom that illuminates the present moment."

"Our bodies…are the root of our true selves, the home of our souls. Our desire to constantly change and control our bodies indicates a deep distrust of our souls."

To accept life, she tells us we must accept death, death of the body, death of a dream, of an experience, of intimacy, of preconceptions, and enter fully into being. The earth is chaos, and yet at the center of chaos is divine intelligence. We can't control chaos but we can surrender to it, learn to live with it, ride it like a wild wave, and merge with the divine essence, which is in us, as well.

Our lives are doomed to chaos, regret, sorrow, but they are also caressed with love, intuition, and wisdom. When we let go and merge with the divine flow, merge with the moment, we have access to our inner wisdom, our innate intuition. Intuition is a gift of spirit. The more we trust it, the freer it is to express.

How do we liberate ourselves from an oppressive ego mind that seeks a world it can control? Find your rhythm. Dance it. Embrace opposites. If you're in writer's block, write words on a page, facing existential paralysis, then move. Trust the process of discovery.

The world is made of dark space, worm holes, black holes, but we can go into that darkness with intention. We are in it and of it and can explore like another rhythm, the rhythm of stillness. "The dark," said poet Theordore Roethke, "has its own light." Ms. Roth reminds us that we are inner navigators, exploring our own idiosyncratic truths. As we live our truth, we inevitably serve humanity from a place of inspiration. As she says, "Inspiration is the intuition of the spirit."

To order this book from Amazon.com, click here!

Visit Lorrie's website at www.lorriekazan.com