Speaker Spotlight – Bettina Rothe
Bettina Rothe, who was born and raised in West Berlin, completed her degree in psychology at the Technical University in Berlin. However, soon after graduating she realized that psychology alone was not enough to create lasting change in people. “It was a very scientific program,” says Bettina, “but my heart has always beaten for trans-personal psychology, shamanism and meditation.” She believes strongly that the body holds our stories and that is where deep change can happen, because according to Bettina, “Most of our information, personal stories, and the stories of our parents and our ancestors, live in our bodies.”
“Most of our information, personal stories, and the stories of our parents and our ancestors, live in our bodies.”
As a result, Bettina left Berlin to attend The Esalen Institute in Big Sur, California. She spent a great deal of time at the Institute studying with pioneers in the field of somatic (body) intelligence and healing modalities, including Gabrielle Roth who is the founder of 5Rhythms®, a conscious dance practice which is the body of work that Bettina has become known for here in Canada. She also spent many years retraining as a coach in a variety of modalities, including leadership embodiment with Wendy Palmer.
“It kind of became my next body of work,” says Bettina who also believes that most people in the Western world only use a fraction of their inner landscape, usually through cognition and the mind. “What I do with leadership development, and working with coaching and personal transformation,” says Bettina, “is to use the body as an access point.” A lot of her practice includes self-awareness—noticing how you are sitting, how you are breathing and what you are able to recognize and feel in your body—while also being aware of what is happening around you. All of this, according to Bettina, “Becomes a source of intelligence.”
“We can call it dancing, we can call it movement, or we can say we are just creating magic together.”
For Bettina, the past few years have been “a real-time of integration—bringing in some of the things that I feel passionate about in research and psychology and my coaching practice in leadership development that have been meaningful.” She also founded a company that focuses on emergent leaders and offers 5Rhythms® as a conscious movement modality and community-building tool.
“We can call it dancing, we can call it movement, or we can say we are just creating magic together,” says Bettina. “But there is something I noticed happening that was a really deep glue between people.” Through this process, she sees herself as a “weaver of community spaces where people come as they are and move in whatever way feels right for them.”
To further facilitate this process, Bettina, who has been passionate about music since her teens, creates her own “aesthetic soundscapes,” under the name of DIVA-B. “As part of my offerings,” she says, “I create these one hour soundscapes that people can download on Sound Cloud and basically dance to anywhere they go. There are different themes and intentions.”
She shares some of her free recordings here, one for meditation and one for dancing:
Standing Strong Practice: https://soundcloud.com/user-205503730-649927833/standing-strong-embodiment-practice-bettina-rothe
https://soundcloud.com/user-205503730-649927833/field-of-resonance-5rhythms-wave
Bettina is looking forward to sharing these practical tools and practices as part her Wise Money Talks session, “Life Aligned,” on Saturday, October 16. Register early as these events fill up fast!
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NOW AVAILABLE! Listen to Bettina’s Wise Money Talks Life Aligned workshop on our YouTube channel.
