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© 2018 Matthias Roth

About M. Roth

Movement in (the) space
11 August 2013
Groups
30 July 2015
Matthias Roth
  • born in Hamburg
  • studied German Language and Literature, Philosophy and Theater Science at Freie Universität Berlin for four semesters starting in  in 1980
  • moved to New York in the summer of 1982 to become a dancer

“Through my teacher Aileen Passloff, then head of the dance department at Bard College where she teaches to this day, I got to know Jin Shin Jyutsu from the beginning as a path to more self awareness. She simply incorporated exercises from Mary Burmeister’s Self Help Book I into the warm up before rehearsal.

Soon, the immediate effect of the art on a very painful sore throat introduced me to the physically practical aspect of the method, but even here my fascination was not so much with the question of how to “treat things” but with what might be the root of the efficiency of such simplicity.

I suspected even then that the root of efficiency was the simplicity itself, even if the search for ‘greater’ efficiency through more complicated and presumably more specialized ‘doing’ was to remain a temptation for some time.”

 

  • after two years of daily Self-Help, first Five-Day Basic Seminar with Mary Burmeister in 1984 in New York City
  • moves to Paris that same year and begins to gather his first experiences as a practitioner
  • continues attending Mary Burmeister’s seminars regularly over the following years
  • organizes and translates seminars for Philomena Dooley as of 1987
  • regularly teaches Self-Help in France from 1988 after translating Self-Help Book 1 into French for that purpose
  • regularly translates the Five-Day Classes in Paris, Bonn and Munich from 1989 on while
  • taking his own Self-Help Classes outside of France into a growing number of European countries, presenting in German, French, English, Italian and Dutch
  • 1994 Teacher-in-Training for the presentation of Five-Day Classes, move to Hamburg
  • 1995 – 2002: his activity as a Five-Day Class Instructor in eventually six languages has him teach 126 Five-Day Classes and a similar number of Special Topic Classes in these years, leading to his
  • Stepping down as a Five-Day Class Instructor in 2003.

“As much as I had enjoyed my extraversion for all these years and the encounter with so many people, places and views on life, I now felt an urgent need to retreat. The inner calling to delve more deeply into genuinely feeling the art – the approach that had marked my first encounter – gained in importance and led my path over the following years.

The pursuit of classes around the topic “To Feel” was the logical consequence, a move back to my native Hamburg” (from Chicago where he had moved in the year 2000) “provided the frame. The teaching of Self-Help regained some of its earlier importance and more “poetic” classes such as the one on Mozart’s “Magic Flute” and on Wagners “Parsifal” became possible…

From the sense of regained peace it started to feel right to pick up the Five-Day Class materials again and to start presenting them again on a limited scale.”

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  • as of 2006 instructs Five-Day Classes and Special Topic Classes again within the Curriculum of Jin Shin Jyutsu, Inc., now in seven languages, while continually developing new and personal formats to share his message experientially.
  • since September 2014, operates a spacious new studio, “Wege, Lauf und Bahn”, in Hamburg to delve more deeply into movement work.
  • in April of 2016, parts ways with JSJ, Inc.
  • in September of that year, produces his first online course, “Essenzen”, in German,
  • begins to develop his own workbooks with all new illustrations and texts that reflect his “digestions” of the Art over the previous thre and-a-half decades, for his new foundational training, “Jin Shin Jyutsu – Being in Movement”
  • premieres module 1 in June of 2017 and presents it in German, French and English that year
  • produces the online course “Essences” in English in the summer of 2017
  • produces his online course, “To Feel” that same summer, in English, French and German
  • premieres modules 2 and 3 of his foundational training, “Jin Shin Jyutsu – Being in Movement”, in 2018
  • launches “monatlicher Online-Studienkreis” in May/June of 2018
  • publishes all three workbooks in German
  • launches “monthly Online Study Circle” in English on April 5, 2019

 

Matthias Roth