Honoring the Roots of

Dallas Dance Community

  • Mati Vargas

    Founder, Body Spirit Dance (5Rhythms)

    Mati Vargas-Gibson began practicing 5Rhythms under the study of Gabrielle Roth in 1998 and began her teaching journey in 2008, in Dallas, Mexico City, and the across the US.

    Her wisdom and joy for sharing the maps created a timeless anchor for the love of 5Rhythms in the Dallas community, where she hosted regular classes and 5Rhythms workshops at The Sammons Center for the Arts. She was a magician at spinning music and took her dancers deep into the rhythms. Her dance program at the country jail changed the lives of many women. Beloved by her students, her heart of service and work of turning art into action in the world continues to ripple. We are thankful for her spontaneity and commitment to Gabrielle’s work.

    She was dedicated creatively investigating how the dance itself offers endless possibilities for opening up and releasing the stories of loneliness or disconnection we all carry: the opportunity for being free in the moment when we dance together. Though Mati transitioned from the body plane in 2022, her spirit and legacy live on through the life of the dance in Dallas, TX.

    “Showing up to your own practice regularly creates the mastery to really dive under the surface to the wiser deeper you...” - Mati Vargas

  • Monica Blossom

    Founder, Ecstatic Dance Dallas

    Monica Blossom discovered conscious dance practice, Ecstatic Dance, and Bhakti Yoga in the summer of 2008 at Esalen Institute where she took her first residential workshop with Michael and Anneli Molin-Skelton, direct students of Gabrielle Roth.

    From that transformative experience, Monica realized the remarkable power of and need for somatic practices. She dedicated herself to building a conscious dance community in Dallas which she launched in 2009 and worked tirelessly building for 13 years until passing the torch to Sarah Sampson and the EDD Dream Team in 2022.

    We exist in gratitude to her unwavering respect and passion for heart-centered creative community and for all the ways she nurtured an ever-widening circle in Dallas dedicated to somatic practices and human evolution. Her devotion the dance created a space of belonging, vulnerability, wild creativity, and profound love that has become the heartbeat of the Dallas conscious dance ecosystem.

    After living in Dallas for 27 years, Monica moved to a charming little Midwestern town in ‘22 to enjoy her home rhythm of Family – just minutes from two of her grown children, their spouses, and the brilliant poems they’ve created called children. This is an ever-widening circle of deep connection where she will always belong.

    As she said during Closing Circle of every ecstatic dance she’s facilitated since 2010:

    “May love have its way with us all.” - Monica Blossom

“Through thousands of dances, I experienced deep transformations in these three realms: intimacy with myself, connection with another, and belonging to the group. It is one of my favourite things to explore when offering 5Rhythms.

Everyone has different responses when dancing with others, but, at the end, we are all humans hungry for connection and ease in all our relations.

Gabrielle said “if you put the psyche in motion it will heal itself”; I’d like to add: “if you put a bunch of people in motion, they will heal together”.

— Mati Vargas

“I will continue to vote for the victory for the evolution and growth of the conscious dance community. I will forever be grateful for my extraordinary good fortune to have danced with you with such wild abandon for so long, so bravely, and so deeply. To witness you in your audacious, sweaty, sacred humanity - the glory of your vulnerable realness, your creative originality, your extraordinary badassery - you have blessed me, and you dance in my heart.”

— Monica Blossom

May love have its way with us all.

Monica Blossom