Energy-Based Practices and the Medicine of Movement—The Cases of 5Rhythms and Core Energetics
Religions July 21, 2025 Géraldine Mossière
An anthropological study examines how the concepts of energy and movement are used to foster well-being, based on fieldwork with Core Energetics and 5Rhythms groups. The circulation of energy is achieved through bodily movements, dances, sensory attention, somatic self-cultivation, and deep conscious experiences. Ritual elements, including a specific spacetime framework and intersubjective exercises, facilitate experiences that renew one's subjective and intersubjective relationship to the self in a restorative way. The author argues that these mind–body–energy groups conflate two Western sources: the legacy of marginalized early Western medical offshoots and discursive references to contemporary interpretations of quantum physics.