At a Glance
His Story
A map to ecstasy.
Tom grew up in England. Dancing was freedom from the very beginning: youth clubs, new wave music, Madonna, Prince. There was something about being on a dance floor that let him be more fully himself than almost anywhere else.
That thread led him through his twenties and into the nightclub circuit, where he used substances to amplify the experience. When that relationship became unsustainable, he needed to put himself back together. That process eventually brought him to Omega Institute, a retreat center in upstate New York, where he was volunteering one summer.
One afternoon in the dining hall, someone heard his British accent and mimicked it. He turned around with a mild frown. There was a woman standing there, green eyes, the whole thing. She told him without hesitation: "You should absolutely, without question, dance with Gabrielle Roth. It'll change your life."
He didn't research it. He signed up and walked in.
Not long into that first workshop, something registered, a sensation he recognized from a much younger place. He describes it as "a map to ecstasy. This unburdening of the mundane and entry into another state. Joy, play, dynamism, eros." The same thing he'd always been chasing, available now without anything else needed.
"I trust the dance as a space to be opened in, as a space to reconnect to what is authentic to my vulnerable truth and to the deep intelligence that is naturally there inside my being."
Tom Truman
He's been practicing ever since. He became a certified 5Rhythms teacher in 2016 and moved to Santa Cruz, where he's held the Monday night floor at The Tannery Arts Center since. He also holds workshops in Santa Cruz, Sacramento, and elsewhere in the Bay Area throughout the year.
His approach to teaching is direct and grounded. The practice, in his view, isn't about achieving anything aesthetic or reaching a particular state. It's about reclaiming the full range of what you are, the parts that got conditioned out, the energies you stopped having access to, the capacity to feel like the author of your own experience rather than a passenger in it.
Twenty years into the practice, he's still being surprised by it.
